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CHRISTIANITY THE 
FINAL RELIGION 


Addresses on the Missionary 
Message for the World today, 
showing that the Old Gospel 
is the Only Gospel 


BY 

SAMUEL M. ZWEMER 

00 



EERDMANS-SEVENSMA CO. 

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN 

1920 



Copyrighted 1920 by 
EERDMANS-SEVENSMA CO 
Grand Rapids, Mich. 



©Cl. 4605424 


JAN ! 7 1921 


19^1 


PREFACE 


JL 


Fanatics have been defined as those who re¬ 
double their energies when they have forgotten 
their aim. Doubtless all who are interested in the 
missionary enterprise are in these days putting 
forth new energy and advocating more rapid 
movement to attain their object. Have not some, 
however, forgotten the goal in their earnest effort 
to press forward? Is there not some danger lest 
we run so fast that we forget to carry the mes¬ 
sage? Will the broader outlook diminish deep in¬ 
sight ? 

A brilliant writer in the Atlantic Monthly 
(May, 1920) characterized the modern missionary 
as one whose “first concern is always something 
deeper, something more vital than questions of 
theological and metaphysical speculation relating 
to the Person and the Work of Christ, to the Vir¬ 
gin Birth (in which, together with other miracles 
he may or he may not believe); to the fine dis¬ 
tinctions between the humanity, the divinity, the 
deity of Christ; to the nature of the Trinity; to 
the Atonement. Upon just one thing he insists: 
that which touches not the bene esse of the Chris¬ 
tian faith, but its esse : the personal assimilation 
in the disciples' life of the teaching and of the 
spirit of Jesus." 

On the contrary, we believe that the very na¬ 
ture of Christianity, its dynamic, its passion, its 
power of missionary appeal, its esse as well as its 



bene esse consists in its credo —its belief in Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, 
who died on the Cross for our sins and arose 
again, who gave us this message as our only com¬ 
mission and sealed it with the promise of his pres¬ 
ence. 

The chapters that form this little book treat 
of this aspect of the missionary message. They 
were first given as addresses in conferences in our 
country and abroad; some appeared in The Con¬ 
structive Quarterly, The Biblical Review or 
The Sunday School Times. They were then 
revised, and are now sent on their errand at the 
request of friends to set forth our conviction in 
the adequacy and sufficiency of “the faith once for 
all delivered to the saints.” That Gospel which 
Paul preached has been the message of all who 
were in his apostolic succession and is today, as 
in his day, “the power of God unto Salvation to 
every one who believeth.” Why should we be 
ashamed of its contents or its implications? In 
an age of doubt it is the only anchor of our hope; 
in the present chaos of international relations it 
alone can bring reconciliation. 

S. M. ZWEMER 

Cairo, Egypt. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 

Earliest Christianity . 9 

CHAPTER II 

Thinking Gray in Missions . 21 

CHAPTER III 

The Solidarity of the Race. 29 

CHAPTER IV 


The Impact of Christianity on Non-Christian 


Religions . 41 

CHAPTER V 

What Is the Apostolic Gospel ?. 57 

CHAPTER VI 

The Stumbling-Block of the Cross. 75 

CHAPTER VII 

Christianity as Final Religion . 95 


















I 


“Travelling on through Amphipolis 
and Apollonia they reached Thessalonica. 
Here there was a Jewish synagogue, and 
Paul, as usual, went in; for three sab¬ 
baths he urged with them on the scrip¬ 
tures, explaining and quoting passages 
to prove that the Messiah had to suffer 
and rise from the dead, and that ‘the 
Jesus I proclaim to you is the Messiah/ 
Some were persuaded and threw in their 
lot with Paul and Silas, including a host 
of devout Greeks and a large number of 
the leading women.”—Acts 17: 1-4 (Mof¬ 
fat’s Translation). 











CHAPTER I 

Earliest Christianity 

I F all the New Testament books were lost except 
one, and that were the earliest epistle written 
by the Apostle Paul, we would still have con¬ 
vincing proof of the historicity of Christianity 
and clear evidence for nearly every article of the 
Apostles’ Creed as expressing the faith of primi¬ 
tive Christians. The earliest and therefore old¬ 
est book of the New Testament is the first letter 
of Paul to the Thessalonians. This is the general 
consensus of opinion among all critics. “In the 
case of the first epistle,” says Dr. Milligan in the 
Standard Bible Dictionary, “its authenticity 
which no one even thought of challenging before 
the nineteenth century is now so generally recog¬ 
nized by critics of all schools, except those who 
reject the Pauline writings altogether, that it is 
not necessary to discuss it further here.” 

The exact date assigned to the epistle depends 
on the chronology of Paul’s life, but all critics are 
agreed that it was not written later than the year 
53 A. D. (some say as early as 49 A. D.), that is, 
less than twenty years or twenty-two years after 
the Crucifixion. All critical opinion, therefore, 
brings us as close as possible to the primitive days 
of Christianity when those who were eyewitnesses 
of what Jesus was and did and suffered were still 


10 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

living. The epistle itself, as Weiss remarks, shows 
(Chapter 5: 25) that Paul began his epistolary in¬ 
tercourse with the churches which he founded “by 
this letter and had therefore to give directions as 
to what use should be made of it.” The same au¬ 
thority points out that Chapter 2: 16 has no ref¬ 
erence to the destruction of Jerusalem, as Baur 
inferred and then made false deductions as to the 
date of the epistle. 

The contents of the epistle, moreover, every¬ 
where point to this early date, especially because 
of its omissions. “Nowhere,” says Dr. Milligan, 
“does the real Paul stand out more clearly before 
us, alike in the intensity of his affection for his 
converts, in the confident assertion of the purity 
of his own motives, and in the fierceness of his in¬ 
dignation against those who are hindering the 
progress of Christ’s work.” Of all of the Pauline 
epistles this one represents perhaps most fully the 
apostle’s normal and familiar style of writing. 
Renan describes it as “stenographed conversa¬ 
tion.” We may be sure that whatever we find in 
this epistle, if it were the only document left us, 
would be sincere and genuine in its character. It 
is a love-letter written to meet pressing needs, 
and with perhaps no thought of any wider au¬ 
dience than those to whom it was addressed. It 
was written and sent from Corinth to Thessa- 
lonica, then, as now, one of the largest and most 
important cities of the Levant. The things that 
took place in this city were not done in a corner. 
The apostle wrote to Jews and Gentiles who were 


EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY 


11 


contemporaries of Christ. Some of them may 
have been present at Jerusalem at Pentecost. The 
witness of this epistle is therefore as strong as 
possible, because it portrays undesignedly the 
character of early Christianity and the faith of 
early Christians. 

When we consider the character of the writer 
as revealed between the lines, and the character 
of those to whom he wrote, a typical group of be¬ 
lievers, who can doubt that what is here taught 
contains the very fundamentals of our faith? If 
we deny these teachings, we cannot honestly call 
ourselves Christians. The issue of our investiga¬ 
tion is therefore to ascertain whether this earli¬ 
est New Testament document contains teaching 
which many now are prepared to deny because 
they believe it was all of later growth and de¬ 
velopment. If, for example, the deification of 
Christ was due to St. John’s Gospel and to St. 
Paul’s later teaching, and the Jesus of the Synop¬ 
tic Gospels is human only, how do we account for 
the fact that such an epistle as the one before us, 
after emphasizing the unity of God, gives such 
strong proof for the deity of Christ and is ad¬ 
dressed without any apology for such teaching to 
a group of Jewish and Gentile believers? 

Regarding the writer, we learn from the epis¬ 
tle itself that he had the authority of an apostle 
(2:6); that he was associated with Silvanus and 
Timothy (1: 1; 3: 2) ; that he was entrusted with 
a message called the Gospel (1: 5; 2: 4), which he 
boldly proclaimed (2:2). The writer had traveled 


12 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

widely. He had visited Athens (3:1), Thessa- 
lonica, Macedonia (4: 10), and Achaia (1: 1; 7:8). 
He had been cruelly treated at Philippi (2:1); 
and, similarly treated, had been driven out from 
Judea by the Jews (2: 15). The man who wrote 
this epistle was a man of prayer (1:2). His only 
hope was in the Lord Jesus Christ (1:3). He 
tried to please God and not man (2:4); He hated 
flattery and hypocrisy (2: 5). He was so careful 
of his conduct that others imitated him as they 
did “the Lord” (1:6). He loved passionately 
those to whom he wrote, longing to see them as a 
father doth his children, as a nurse cherisheth her 
babe. He was willing to pour out his own soul for 
them (2:7, 8, 11, 17; 3:8, 10). He sought no 
favor from the hands of those to whom he wrote, 
because he supported himself, working not only 
by day but by night (2:9). He had his own fight 
for character, his ideals were those of a soldier 
(5:8), and he knew his enemy (2: 18). 

The letter was written on the spur of the mo¬ 
ment, just after Timothy had arrived from Thes- 
salonica with glad news (3: 6). Whatever he tells 
them in this epistle is based on his own experi¬ 
ence, his faith in God, in Jesus Christ, and his 
hope of salvation. This is perfectly evident from 
the unconscious change of the pronouns “ye” and 
“we,” especially in 4: 13, 14, 17. No man could 
write in this fashion with the intent to deceive or 
to idealize, and we repeat once more before we 
analyze the teaching of the epistle that Paul, once 
a Jew but now a Christian, who has suffered for 


EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY 


13 


being such, writes all this less than twenty years 
after the death of Jesus , the Nazarene , on the 
cross. 

The teaching of the epistle touches nearly 
every Christian doctrine. For the sake of con¬ 
venience we have grouped the facts as follows: 

1. He who wrote and those to whom he wrote 
believed in the immortality of the soul (5:23). 
They believed in one God, the Creator, who is 
called “Father” (1:1; 3: 11), who is the living 
true and only God (1: 9; 3: 9). This Father sent 
his Son from heaven (1: 10) and revealed his will 
through Him who is called Jesus Christ (5: 18). 
He is called the “God of Peace” (5:23), who 
searches hearts (2:4), desires holiness in men 
(4: 3), and sanctifies believers (5: 23). 

This God made known his will by prophets 
(2: 15) and makes it known now (that is, at the 
time when the apostle was writing) through his 
Gospel, which is a divine message (2: 8) and not 
merely the word of man (2: 13). There is no pan¬ 
theism or polytheistic teaching in this epistle. Its 
doctrine of God is complete and fits in with the 
teaching of the Old Testament. We have clear 
reference also to the call of God to salvation and 
to holiness (2:12; 4:7; 5:24). The afflictions 
of believers are also predetermined by God (3:3). 

2. What does this earliest document teach in 
regard to Jesus Christ? He is an historic per¬ 
sonality, so well known that He needs no further 
introduction to its readers. He is the standard of 
conduct and character (1:6) and had a company of 


14 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

apostles of whom Paul was one. After his perfect 
life He was killed by the Jews (2: 15), who are 
suffering God’s wrath in consequence (2: 16). But 
this same Jesus afterward arose from the dead 
(1: 10; 5: 10; 4: 14). The writer comes back to 
this great truth even in so short an epistle re¬ 
peatedly. Jesus is now in heaven (1:10), but 
speaks through apostles (4:15). They take 
solemn oaths in his name (5: 27) to claim author¬ 
ity for his message. It almost seems a claim of 
inspiration (compare 4: 15). Jesus who ascended 
into heaven is coming again (2: 19; 4: 15; 5: 23). 
His coming will be unexpected (5:3), with his 
saints (3: 13), in glory (4: 16), in the clouds of 
the air (4: 17), but the time of his coming again 
remains uncertain. It will be as that of a thief in 
the night or of travail upon a woman with child 
(5: 2, 3). If this phraseology is original with the 
Apostle Paul, it bears a striking resemblance to 
that of Matthew (24: 43), and of Luke (12: 39). 
If it is quoted, have we not an argument here for 
the early date of the Gospel ? At least of an orig¬ 
inal document that contained these phrases ? 

What is the chai acter of Jesus (Christ m this 
epistle? Can He be classified with prophets and 
apostles? Is He lower than the angels, or is it 
clear from this epistle that He is very God? His 
name is coupled with that of Deity, not once but 
frequently (1:1; 3:11; 4:14). He is called 
“Lord” (1:6). “God’s Son” (1:10), “the Lord 
Jesus” (4:1), “Christ Jesus” (5:17), “Jesus” 
(1: 10), and “the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1; 1:3; 


EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY 


15 


5: 28). It is not necessary to go into the signifi¬ 
cance of these names. All of them would be full 
of meaning, especially to Jewish Christians, yet 
none the less to Gentile converts. 

The One who bears these high titles has the 
attributes of Deity. He directs by his providence 
(3: 11), avenges iniquity (4: 6), has authority on 
the day of judgment, for it is called “his day/ 7 
He comes from heaven with his angels and the 
“trump of God.” He is also the Lord of salvation 
because He delivers from the wrath to come (1: 
10), is the source of salvation (5:9), establishes 
hearts and produces holiness (3: 13). 

Although He lived a life on earth, which ter¬ 
minated in death, his present vital power is so uni¬ 
versal that He is the fountain and source of love 
(3: 12), not only among believers but toward all 
humanity. Believers stand fast in Him (13:8). 
This is their life. His grace is the highest good 
(5: 28), and somehow this Lord Jesus Christ is in 
constant vital union with those who believe in 
Him, not only now (4: 1), but even after death 
(5: 10; 4: 14; 4: 16). 

Is it possible to suppose that such a conception 
of Jesus was the invention of such a man, and 
could this historic personage have been trans¬ 
formed within two decades from the human into 
the Divine? The witness of this epistle is the 
witness of the aboriginal faith of Christians in 
the deity of the Christ. 

3. The epistle also teaches much regarding 
the Holy Spirit. He is a person (1:5, 6), the 


16 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

source of joy in believers (1: 6), and given of God 
to them (4: 8). His symbol is that of fire, for He 
can be quenched (5: 18). In this case also we 
have indication that the language used by John 
the Baptist and by Christ himself was familiar to 
the apostle. 

In view of this teaching in regard to God’s Son 
and the Holy Spirit, it does not surprise us to find 
three references to the doctrine of the Trinity 
(1: 3-5; 5: 18, 18, and 5: 23). 

4. We turn now to the teaching of this epistle 
regarding the church. Here we have a beautiful 
picture of apostolic Christianity. It is called “the 
church of Christ Jesus” (2: 14). It consists of a 
company of brethren (1: 14; 5: 26). It is founded 
on the teaching of the Gospel (1:5; 2:2). Its 
doors are open to Gentile and Jew (2: 16). Its 
watchword is: “Love for all humanity” (4: 10). 

The church seems to be well organized (1:1; 
2: 14; 32: 6; 5: 12, 13). It therefore exercises 
discipline (5: 14). Among its members there are 
a number once idolaters but who now worship the 
one true God (1:9). Their theory of compara¬ 
tive religion is that when they were idolaters they 
were “in the night and the darkness,” but now 
they are “the children of light and of the day,” 
believers built up by the Word (2: 13). 

There is no reference to the sacraments, but 
this does not necessarily prove that they were not 
in use. 

What marvelous transformations of character 
must have taken place among this company of be- 


EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY 


17 


lievers! We know from other writers what was 
the moral condition of the Roman empire, and 
especially of its great seaports. Thessalonica was 
no exception. Only the life of Jesus can account 
for such ideals of character and standards of 
moral judgment as we find in this short epistle. 
Grace, peace, and love are considered the highest 
virtues (1:1; 1:3; 3:6; 4:9). Here were peo¬ 
ple who proved faithful to high ideals under af¬ 
fliction and persecution (1:6; 2:2; 2:14; 3:4; 
3:7). How these Christians loved one another 
(2: 10, 12) ! It was a missionary church (1:7, 
8), full of the joy of serving (1: 6), toiling and 
laboring for some high ideal (1:3), with con¬ 
stant prayer to God for his assistance and bless¬ 
ing (1: 2; 5: 17; 5: 25). Here was a little company 
of men and women opposed to hypocrisy (2: 4, 5), 
uncleanness, error, and guile (2: 3), alive to the 
duty of self-support (4: 11, 12), engaged in the 
fight for character against Satan (3: 5), and so 
successful that the Apostle glories in them, re¬ 
joices in their spiritual welfare, and longs to see 
them (2: 17, 19; 3:8, 12). And all this twenty 
years after the crucifixion! 

Their ideals of married life, its purpose and 
purity, were high (4: 4, 5). They had learned the 
lesson of forgiveness (5: 15) and of universal love 
and benevolence. Their lives were full of prayer 
and gratitude at all times and for all things (5: 17, 
18), they were earnestly attempting to abstain 
from every form of evil (5: 20), and they believed 
that God was able to preserve their spirit, soul, 


18 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

and body blameless (5: 23). It is no wonder that 
their greeting therefore was with an holy kiss 
(5: 26). 

Finally, we may ask, what was their hope 
which kept them steadfast in such a place and at 
such a time, a flock of sheep in the midst of 
wolves? They looked for Christ’s return. He 
was their hope, their joy, their comfort (4: 16; 
4: 18; 4: 13). After the temptations of Satan 
(2: 18; 3: 5) had been endured and overcome they 
looked forward to death as a sleep (4: 13). Not 
only a sleep, but a sleep which was in Jesus, on 
his loving bosom. After death comes the resur¬ 
rection, at Christ’s glorious appearing with the 
rapture of the saints to meet Him in the air. And 
they comforted one another with these words: 
“We shall be forever with the Lord” (4: 17). 

Such is the picture of early Christianity. What 
further need have we of testimony or apologetic? 
If all the documents of the New Testament were 
lost except this earliest epistle, we would still 
have the faith once for all delivered to the saints. 

“Faith of our fathers, holy faith! 

We will be true to thee till death.” 


II 

“Anyone who is ‘advanced’ and will 
not remain by the doctrine of Christ, 
does not possess God: he who remains by 
the doctrine of Christ possesses both 
the Father and the Son. If anyone comes 
to you and does not bring this doctrine, 
do not admit him to the house—do not 
even greet him, for he who greets him 
shares in his wicked work.”—2 John: 9- 
11 (Moffatt’s Translation). 









CHAPTER II 


Thinking Gray in Missions 

I N his book, Thinking Black, Dan Crawford 
has introduced us to the psychology of the 
black man so as to give us a new angle of vi¬ 
sion. The primitive mind seems, naturally, to 
think in black and white rather than in gray. Per¬ 
haps our modern civilization has made us lose 
the power of sharp distinctions in the world of 
thought. We were told that one of the results of 
the war would be to teach men everywhere to 
think less superficially and more conclusively on 
moral questions. Is this true? 

There is always a tendency to compromise in 
morals, and the same tendency is evident in re¬ 
gard to the work of evangelization. God divided 
the light from the darkness, not only in the world 
of nature, but in the world of thought. “This, 
then, is the message,” says John, “which we have 
heard of Him and declare unto you, that God is 
light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say 
we have fellowship with Him and walk in dark¬ 
ness, we lie and do not the truth.” The attitude 
of the apostles toward the non-Christian religions 
is not expressed in gray or twilight shades. There 
are no blurred edges to their convictions. “Sharp 
as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine” in their 
teachings. 


22 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

What Paul thinks of idolatry is clear, not only 
from the first chapter of Romans, but from such 
words as those in his epistle to the Corinthians: 
“The things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sac¬ 
rifice to demons and not to God, and I would not 
that ye should have communion with demons.” 

John was the apostle of love, and yet it was he 
who wrote in regard to the Gospel message: “If 
anyone cometh unto you and bringeth not this 
teaching, receive him not into your house and give 
him no greeting, for he that giveth him greeting 
partaketh in his evil works.” Such intolerance is 
impossible to those who think in terms of gray— 
without intolerance of any sort. 

James does not hesitate to class the devils with 
those who trust in Unitarianism (2: 19). And 
Jude speaks of the false teachers of his day as 
“autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, plucked 
up by the roots * * * * wandering stars for 
whom the blackness of darkness hath been re¬ 
served forever.” 

What we need today in missions is less com¬ 
parative religion and more positive religion. It is 
possible to dwell upon the tolerable things in Hin¬ 
duism, the ideal things of Buddhism and the noble 
things in Islam even as one sifts out grains of 
gold from tons of earth, to the practical exclusion 
of the social evils, the spiritual darkness and the 
spiritual death which dominate these systems. 
This was not the method of the apostles. A re¬ 
cent writer in the Indian Witness puts the fact 
in very forcible language: “The wise general does 


THINKING GRAY IN MISSIONS 


23 


not carefully search out the strong spots in the 
fortress of his antagonist and then spend his time 
illuminating them with his searchlights. He finds 
the weak spots and dwells on them with his heavy 
artillery. Let some of our sages who are scholas¬ 
tic rather than practical prepare a list of the 
things vitally antagonistic to Christian truth, 
then the men who are practical rather than schol¬ 
astic will be able to avoid scattering an ineffective 
effort and to concentrate on those things the de¬ 
struction of which by their fall will cause the fall 
of false faiths.” 

To us who work among Moslems, their denial 
of Jesus Christ’s mission, His incarnation, His 
atonement, His deity are the very issues of the 
conflict. Almost spontaneously, therefore, what 
might have been mere theological dogma in the 
mind of the missionary turns into a deep spiritual 
conviction, a logical necessity and a great passion. 
Face to face with those who deny our Saviour and 
practically deify Mohammed, one is compelled to 
think in black and white. The challenge of the 
Muezzin , who calls to Moslem prayer, is a cry of 
pain; it hurts. In the silence of the night one 
cannot help thinking how it pleased the Father 
that in Jesus Christ all fulness should dwell, not 
in Mohammed. Face to face with Islam one can¬ 
not help asking what will be the final outcome of 
Christian Unitarianism. In the history of Islam 
its so-called monotheism has always degenerated 
into some form of pantheism or deism. 

When Moslems assert the Gospel is corrupted 


24 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

and untrustworthy, the missionary can find no 
help in textbooks of destructive criticism. One 
wonders whether the great conflict between Islam 
and Christianity will not have to be fought out be¬ 
tween the covers of the Bible. They themselves 
are abandoning their Traditions and the Koran in 
public and private discussion and are appealing to 
the Christian Scriptures. Their appeal is often 
based on the interpretation of those who think 
in gray. A recent paragraph on the subject of 
Christ's Deity that appeared in an Indian Moslem 
magazine copied all its arguments from books by 
modern Unitarians. 

An Arabic book published at Beirut a few 
years ago is entitled Heathen Doctrines in the 
Christian Religion. It is by a Moslem graduate 
from a mission college who fancies that he has 
proved Christianity false by appealing to Euro¬ 
pean critics of the destructive school. In Cairo 
the Moslem press quotes Unitarian interpretation 
of New Testament doctrine as proof against the 
New Testament Christ. The Christian who has 
no convictions in regard to the great funda¬ 
mentals of Christianity is easily led to treat Islam 
as a sister religion and all Moslems as seekers 
after God in their own way. 

Now, if there is no real distinction between re¬ 
generation and evolution, if there was no miracle 
at Bethlehem and only a martyrdom on Calvary, 
we may patiently await the future development of 
Islam on the right lines. But in that case the 
missionary is no longer a proclaimer of the truth; 


THINKING GRAY IN MISSIONS 


25 


he is only a seeker after truth. He is no longer 
an architect and builder, but a geologist looking 
for fossil specimens in old strata to complete his 
collection of things once alive, but now dead. He 
has interest in religion, but not passion for Christ. 

“The great obstacle,” writes an experienced 
missionary from India, “in the way of the success 
of the Gospel in non-Christian lands is not the at¬ 
titude of the people or the inherent difficulties of 
the work, but the tendency on the part of mis¬ 
sionaries to be judges instead of advocates, with 
a desire to hold the balance of truth rather than 
wield its sword.” 

The painful attitude of neutral states in the 
World War should prove to the Christian that for 
him there can be no neutrality in a war for a 
Kingdom which has no frontiers. 

The effect of thinking in gray is inevitable on 
the messenger as well as on his message. Twi¬ 
light life is not conducive to spiritual health. We 
need the full blaze of the light of the glory of God 
in the face of Jesus Christ. His authority must 
be supreme in the intellectual sphere. His belief 
in the Old Testament scriptures and his statement 
that “they cannot be broken” leaves only one al¬ 
ternative; if we reject them, we reject Him also. 
It is not hard to accept the miracles of the Old 
and New Testament if we accept the miracle in 
the first chapter of Genesis and the greater mir¬ 
acle in the first chapter of John’s Gospel. As 
R. L. Knox says in his brilliant book Some Loose 
Stones : 


26 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

“Orthodox theology explains all the miracles 
recorded of our Saviour under one single hypoth¬ 
esis that He was omnipotent God. But the enemy 
of miracle is forced to give a variety of different 
explanations; that the healing of the sick was 
faith-healing, the stilling of the storm, coinci¬ 
dence, the feeding of the five thousand a misrep¬ 
resented sacrament, the withering of the fig tree 
a misrepresented parable, the raising of Lazarus 
a case of premature burial, and so on.” 

A mutilated Gospel can only mean a mutilated 
spiritual life. When we walk in the light we do 
not mix colors. Christ’s touch cures color-blind¬ 
ness. There is a noble intolerance in the very 
words used so often by the Apostle John: light— 
darkness, truth—lie, life—death, God—devil. The 
effect of thinking in gray always leads to compro¬ 
mise, and where there is compromise there is in¬ 
decision. Men have opinions instead of convic¬ 
tions; they join Erasmus in his study rather than 
Luther nailing his theses to the door of the ca¬ 
thedral. But Luther would have made a better 
foreign missionary than Erasmus, especially in 
these days when so many in the Christian and 
non-Christian world are thinking in gray. 


Ill 


“The God who made the world and all 
things in it, he, as Lord of heaven and 
earth, does not dwell in shrines that are 
made by human hands; he is not served 
by human hands as if he needed any¬ 
thing, for it is he who gives life and 
breath and all things to all men. All na¬ 
tions he has created from a common ori¬ 
gin, to dwell all over the earth, fixing 
their allotted periods and the boundaries 
of their abodes, meaning them to seek 
for God on the chance of finding him in 
their groping for him. Though indeed 
he is close to each one of us, for it is in 
him that we live and move and exist—as 
some of your own poets have said.”— 
Acts 17: 24.-28 (Moffatt’s Translation). 








CHAPTER III 


The Solidarity of the Race 

T HE world was never so small as it is today, 
yet never was it so large. Discovery has in¬ 
creased our knowledge of its vast areas, 
while invention has decreased its circum¬ 
ference and diameter. The sources of the Nile 
are known; central Asia has been explored; we 
have maps of the heart of Africa, and the north 
and south poles have been discovered; desert and 
jungle and ice floe have yielded up their last se¬ 
cret to the intrepid pioneer. Joseph Cook's state¬ 
ment in one of his Boston lectures, that “the nine¬ 
teenth century has made the whole world one 
neighborhood, the twentieth century will make it 
one brotherhood," is being fulfilled. 

An earthquake in Tokio is recorded on the 
seismograph at Washington; famine in India 
changes the price of wheat on the exchange at 
Chicago; the annual flood of the Nile is watched 
with keen interest by the cotton brokers of Man¬ 
chester; the assassination of the crown prince of 
Serbia brought a panic to the pearl markets of 
Arabia; the Red Cross drive for Armenian relief 
found response in the heart of humanity every¬ 
where ; from Patagonia to Alaska, and from 
Shanghai to Chicago gifts were sent for distribu¬ 
tion to the victims of Turkish atrocities. It has 
become literally true that no man liveth to him- 


30 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


self. The war has made us realize as never be¬ 
fore the unity of the world and the solidarity of 
the race. 

There is in our day a special appropriate¬ 
ness in the message which Paul delivered on Mars 
Hill, consecrated to the god of war, and face to 
face with the Christless civilization of Greece and 
Rome: 

“God hath made of one blood all nations of men 
for to dwell on all the face of the earth; and hath 
determined the times before appointed and the 
bounds of their habitation; that they should seek 
the Lord, if haply they might feel after him and 
find him though he be not far from every one of 
us.” 

1. Paul’s great declaration of our unity by crea¬ 
tion and in redemption was based on his faith in 
the Old Testament Scriptures. All other voices, 
however loudly they proclaim the Fatherhood of 
God and the brotherhood of man, are only echoes 
of the testimony which the Jew finds in Genesis 
and the Psalms, in Isaiah and the Prophets. 

Nowhere do we find among all the sacred books 
of the East such clear testimony to the unity of 
the race and the possibility of a League of Nations 
and the brotherhood of man as in the Old Testa¬ 
ment. Who can read the sixty-seventh Psalm with¬ 
out breathing the atmosphere of a cosmopolitan 
spirit? What a vision Isaiah had of the future 
destiny of the race, and of the time that was to be 
when God’s glory should cover the earth and all 
nations should see the brightness of his rising! 


THE SOLIDARITY OF THE RACE 


31 


The story of Adam may be a mystery, but it is not 
a myth to the writers of the New Testament. 

The solidarity of the race in its common origin 
is confirmed by its solidarity in our common re¬ 
demption. It is with deep philosophic insight that 
the Apostle Paul builds his theology upon this 
foundation: “As in Adam—so in Christ.” While 
the Apostle John puts the capstone to the Bible 
teaching on this subject in the Revelation vision 
of ransomed humanity united again of every tribe, 
and kindred, and tongue, and people. The Lord 
Jesus Christ, in his teaching, always took for 
granted this solidarity of the race. He came as 
the Light of the world, and commissioned his 
apostles to go into all the world and make disci¬ 
ples of all nations; He anticipated no barriers 
which would prove unsurmountable to those who 
loved Him. When the Jews accused Him of being 
a Samaritan and having a devil, He passed by in 
scorn the first insinuation. In Him there was no 
race pride or race prejudice. He said to his dis¬ 
ciples “Call no man your master; ye are all breth¬ 
ren.” 

After many vague and bizarre theories mod¬ 
ern science has come back to a belief in the soli¬ 
darity of the race and its unity. The microscope 
can distinguish the blood of brutes from that of 
humans, but not the blood of the Hottentot from 
that of the Hindu or of the Chinese. The old divi¬ 
sion by pigment of the skin, the shape of the skull, 
the texture of the hair and the facial angle has 
disappeared. Physiology, anthropology and psy- 


32 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

chology alike testify to the essential unity of the 
human race. 

This unity is far deeper than that of external 
resemblances or intellectual capacity; it is a moral 
unity. All men everywhere have been conscious 
of sin with its suffering and unrest. The human 
conscience, although largely influenced by here¬ 
dity and environment, yet shows a marvelous 
likeness in its response to the fundamental prin¬ 
ciples of moral law. The thirst after God and fel¬ 
lowship with him, the sense of the eternal, the be¬ 
lief in the immortality of the soul—what are these 
but so many evidences of the solidarity of the 
race ? The human family have shown everywhere 
the same capacity and possibilities of achieve¬ 
ment under similar conditions and privileges. 
Japan has become a leader in science, India in 
philosophy, China in industrial development, while 
Armenia leads the world in the spirit of sacrifice. 

The World War has shown, as nothing else 
could, the essential unity of the race and the ties 
that bind our common humanity. The East and 
the West met in no man’s land. Europe, Asia and 
Africa sat together with America around the 
peace table to determine the destinies of human¬ 
ity and to “make the whole world safe for democ¬ 
racy.” In the trenches of France and Flanders 
representatives from every part of the British 
empire, from the French colonies of Africa, from 
China and India were thrown together in the clos¬ 
est fellowship. 


THE SOLIDARITY OF THE RACE 33 

They were organized under one leadership, 
with one ideal, and one hope, facing a common 
peril and finishing a common task. The East and 
the West mingled as never before and learned to 
understand each other. The negro troops from 
the southern states and those from Algeria fought 
together against a common foe. According to the 
daily press the negroes of the United States have 
in this way surprised the world. It is said that 
when the colored troops left Birmingham, Ala¬ 
bama, they placed placards on the day coaches 
with this inscription: “This color will not run!” 
Every negro regiment made a record that places 
it high in the military values of Americanism. 
One white commander of a negro regiment was 
ordered by a superior officer to take his troops out 
of a dangerous position at the front, and the 
prompt answer was: “My men never retreat!” 
They went on and the wrath of the superior of¬ 
ficer was consumed in cheers. The Eighth Illinois 
came back with twenty-two men among them 
wearing the American D. S. C., while sixty-eight 
wore the croix de guerre. Army officers who met 
their ship said there were more decorations visible 
among the Eighth, or Three Hundred and Seven¬ 
tieth infantry (as it is now designated), than in 
any other regiment which had so far returned to 
the United States. 

The Indian soldiers proved their valor on every 
front. Bengalis, Pathans, Ghurkas won the Vic¬ 
toria Cross for gallantry, and never again will 
Kipling speak of these men as “lesser breeds with¬ 
out the law.” 


34 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

Not only on the battlefield, but in the relief of 
suffering, in Red Cross drives and in Y. M. C. A. 
activities the unity of the world has been mar¬ 
velously evident. The spirit of sacrifice and of 
service took hold of distant races and diverse na¬ 
tionalities, drawing them as comrades into a new 
experience of unselfish devotion. 

2. This solidarity of the race, however, which 
must be admitted in theory, which is revealed in 
Scripture, and which has been illustrated during 
the war, is denied in fact and made of none effect 
through race hatred and prejudice. How many a 
Peter still needs the vision of the sheet let down 
from heaven before he admits that nothing human 
is common or unclean. 

Even within the church we have not empha¬ 
sized the great truth that God is not a respecter 
of persons. The history of western civilization 
has many a dark page of international wrongs due 
to the trampling of the stronger upon the rights 
of the weaker race. Several years before the war 
one of our own poets wrote in Harper's Weekly 
this poem stinging with a sarcasm based on truth: 

“We are the chosen people—look at the hue of our skins! 
Others are black and yellow—that is because of their sins. 
We are the heirs of the ages, masters of every race, 
Proving our right and title by the bullet’s saving grace, 
Slaying the naked red men; making the black one our 
slave, 

Flaunting our color in triumph over a world-wide grave. 
Indian, Maori and Zulu; red men, yellow and black— 
White are their bones wherever they met with the white- 
wolf’s pack. 

We are the chosen people—whatever we do is right, 
Feared as men fear the leper, whose skin, like our own, is 
white!” 


THE SOLIDARITY OF THE RACE 


35 


No one who has read the history of the Opium 
war, the dealings of the Dutch in South Africa 
with the Hottentots, the Century of Dishonor , 
described by Helen Hunt Jackson, in our dealings 
with the American Indians, the atrocities perpe¬ 
trated on the Congo, or the story of the drink 
traffic in Africa and the South Seas, can fail to 
justify the sarcasm of the poet. The record is one 
of which we should be ashamed. If God has made 
of one blood all nations, we may well hope that He 
is through Christ the propitiation not only for our 
national sins, but for the national sins of the 
whole world. 

Speaking of the dangers of mere nationalism, 
the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore says: “This 
nationalism is a cruel epidemic of evil that is 
sweeping over the human world of the present 
age and eating into its moral vitality. * * * * 
You must keep in mind that this political creed of 
national patriotism has not been given a very long 
trial. The lamp of ancient Greece is extinct in 
the land where it was first lighted, the power of 
Rome lies dead and buried under the ruins of its 
vast empire. But the civilization, whose basis is 
society and the spiritual ideal of man, is still a 
living thing in China and in India.” The same 
sentiment is expressed by the German writer 
Nicolai in his remarkable, thought-stirring book, 
The Biology of War. 

A dignitary of the church of England, Bishop 
Gore, recently said: “In the sight of God, in the 
judgment of Christ, no nation has any preroga- 


36 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

tive right; we believe He cares equally for every 
race of every color or capacity, and that he lays 
it upon each nation alike to make the most of it¬ 
self and its resources in order that it may better 
minister to the needs of all mankind, and main¬ 
tain the universal and impartial interests of jus¬ 
tice and freedom and peace.” 

We must, therefore, Christianize our interna¬ 
tional relations, and through the work of Chris¬ 
tian missions restore the lost spiritual unity of 
the race in Jesus Christ our Lord. Only Christ can 
do it, and only in his spirit of compassion and 
sacrificial love can we help Him to accomplish the 
impossible. There must be an armistice of passion 
and hatred as well as an armistice of war. Our 
missionary work should never be that of conde¬ 
scension, but of communion. The heathen are not 
“lesser breeds without the law,” but prodigal chil¬ 
dren painfully seeking their way back to the Fath¬ 
er’s house and the Father’s heart. The races less 
favored are not the white man’s burden—still less 
his beasts of burden—but the white man’s respon¬ 
sibility and opportunity. As the little girl said to 
the policeman who remonstrated when she was 
carrying a child larger than herself through the 
crowded traffic: “No, he is not heavy; he is my 
brother .” The hymns of hate have had their day. 
Let us tune our voices and our hearts to the hymn 
of love. The London Times of December 26, 
1917, published a woman’s reply to Sir Arthur 
Conan Doyle who at that time preached vengeance 


THE SOLIDARITY OF THE RACE 


37 


on Germany. It is a great message which Ethel 
M. Arnold wrote for our days of reconstruction: 

“O men of the future! Is it hate that your spirits crave 
To build the new world with vision, to build and to save? 
Is it hate that we women need as trustees of the race? 

Is it hate that we want to see stamped on the English 
face ? 

What but hate, fruit of envy, loathiest weed that grows, 
Has made of the men who fight us bandits, not decent 
foes ? 

Men maddened and drugged with hate, a poisoned dehu¬ 
manized breed, 

Because they have drunk of the brew, the hellish brew of 
the weed! 

For the victor's right to avenge, for strength to see jus¬ 
tice done, 

For faith to disperse the darkness now veiling the face 
of the sun, 

For power to uproot the weed, the noisome growth of the 
pit— 

For these things, not hate, they died, ‘the men who have 
done their bit.' ” 

If there is anything that the great war unmis¬ 
takably has taught us, it is the fundamental truth 
of human brotherhood in Jesus Christ. He has 
broken down all middle walls of partition. 

The Peace Table that really counts is the one 
at which He is always standing as He did on the 
night on which He was betrayed. It is the same 
Peace Table where He appeared suddenly when the 
doors were shut for fear of Jews, and said to the 
little band of disciples, “My peace I give unto 
you.” Then He showed them his hands and his 
side. It is when we see Him in his resurrection 
glory with the evidences of our common humanity 
—the mark of our spear and of our nails, that we 


38 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

will forgive each other by remembering Him. A 
British writer in The Round Table, discussing 
the redemption of Germany, tells the legend of 
the soul of Judas Iscariot: “It fled from the sui¬ 
cide’s corpse through the void, and passed from 
abyss to abyss, till at last remorse yielded to grief. 
And behold a great light: and the desolate ghost 
from the outer darkness looked in (for the win¬ 
dows of heaven were open), and saw the apostles, 
his brethren, standing about a table laid with 
bread and wine, the body and blood of their Lord. 
Then came One, who took him by the hand, and 
drew him inside. ‘We have waited for thee,’ said 
the Master whom Judas Iscariot betrayed. ‘My 
guests could not sit down to my supper till thou 
wast here.’ So, after many days, will the soul of 
Germany, purged and renewed, come back to the 
fellowship of civilized nations. We may taste the 
communion of freedom meanwhile. But we can¬ 
not sit down to the feast till Germany is there.” 

Has a new day dawned, a new era with its 
League of Nations and love for democracy ? Is it 
a day of reconstruction, not only economic and 
social and national, but of moral and spiritual re¬ 
construction? Are we ready for the task? 

“O see that ye build securely 

When the time of building comes, 

With square-hewn blocks of righteousness 
And cornerstones of faithfulness 
And girders strong of righted wrong 
And the blood of our martyrdoms. 

And build on the One Foundation 
That shall make the building sure 
The Rock that was laid ere the world was made, 
Build on Him, and ye build secure.” 


IV 

“Hold your ground, tighten the belt 
of truth about your loins, wear integrity 
as your coat of mail, and have your feet 
shod with the stability of the gospel of 
peace; above all, take faith as your 
shield, to enable you to quench all the 
fire-tipped darts flung by the evil one, 
put on salvation as your helmet, and take 
the Spirit as your sword (that is, the 
word of God).”—Eph. 6: 14-17 (Moffatt’s 
Translation). 


CHAPTER IV 


The Impact of Christianity on Non-Christian 

Religions 

T HE impact of Christianity on the non-Chris¬ 
tian religions began nineteen centuries ago, 
and will not cease until the kingdoms of 
this world have become the Kingdom of the 
Lord and of his Christ. This impact has gathered 
momentum and strength throughout the cen¬ 
turies. Never before was it so world-wide and so 
strongly evident. 

The definition of mechanical impact is full of 
significance and pregnant with illustration in con¬ 
sidering the spiritual impact of a religion of Life, 
which is supernatural, on the other religions of 
the world. “Impact,” we are told, “is the colli¬ 
sion or shock occasioned by the meeting of two 
bodies, one or both being in motion.” Now, it is 
perfectly evident that such impact is impossible 
unless there are two bodies. At least one of them 
must be in motion, and the effect of the impact 
will depend on the weight of the bodies, their mo¬ 
mentum and their resisting power. The effect of 
the impact of two bodies may be only a rebound, 
as in the case of a rubber ball against a stone wall. 
It may result in penetration, as when a cannon¬ 
ball strikes a fort, or it may result in the com¬ 
plete disintegration of one of the two bodies, as 


42 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

when a live shell strikes a fortification. These 
laws of the natural world find their application in 
the spiritual, and the impact of bodies terrestrial 
is a parable of the spiritual and moral effects re¬ 
sulting from the impact of a living Christianity on 
the other religions of earth. 

Christianity and the non-Christian religions 
are two distinct conceptions. Their real relation, 
therefore, when they come into contact is that of 
impact, and not of compromise. Christianity is 
distinct in its origin. Its revelation is supernat¬ 
ural, and its Founder was the Lord from heaven. 
In a real sense the Church of Christ can say with 
the Psalmist: “He hath not dealt so with any 
other nation, and as for his statutes, they have 
not known them.” Christianity is distinct in its 
character from all other religions. If it were not, 
there could be no universal mission. It is distinct 
in its effect. If it were not, there should be no 
foreign missions. “There may be comparative 
religions,” as Dr. Parker has said, “but Chris¬ 
tianity is not one of them.” The non-Christian 
religions are inadequate to meet the intellectual, 
social, moral and spiritual needs of the human 
race. Only the Bread of Life can meet the famine 
of human hearts. Only the torch of the Gospel 
can lighten spiritual darkness; and the human 
heart finds no rest until it rests in Christ. The 
missionary character of Christianity, therefore, 
demands impact with every non-Christian system. 
“Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel.” 
The glory of God is manifested in the strength 


THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY 


43 


and momentum of this impact. “For this purpose 
was the Son of God manifested that He might de¬ 
stroy the works of the devil.” 

When it was proposed in Berlin to found a chair 
of comparative religions, Harnack, the theologian 
and church historian, gave three reasons why 
such a chair has no place in a great university. 
The first reason he gave in these words: “There 
is only one religion which was revealed from God. 
All the other so-called religions are the inventions 
of men. One has come down from heaven; the 
others are of the earth, earthy. One is a divine 
revelation from the Creator of the universe; and 
all the others may be classified as mere moral 
philosophies.” Now, whether or no we join with 
Harnack and Theodore Parker in stating our be¬ 
lief, we cannot believe in Christian missions un¬ 
less we believe that the Christian religion and 
non-Christian religions are two distinct concep¬ 
tions, which cannot avoid impinging the one upon 
the other. Christianity is distinct from the non- 
Christian philosophies and the non-Christian re¬ 
ligions in its origin. It is distinct in its character. 
It is entirely distinct in its effect. So much is 
there in Buddhism that resembles Christianity, 
that the early Jesuits thought it the devil's imi¬ 
tation of Christianity. But in spite of all the world- 
movements toward civilization, in spite of the 
changes, in spite of the fact that “the morning 
light is breaking and the darkness disappears” 
through Africa and Asia, these non-Christian re¬ 
ligions in their nature and character and effect 


44 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

are wholly what they have always been—distinct 
from the Christian religion. What is Buddhism, 
for example, in this twentieth century. Hear the 
testimony of Lord Curzon, whom nobody would 
accuse of being prejudiced in favor of the Chris¬ 
tian religion over against the non-Christian reli¬ 
gions. In his book on the Problems of the Far 
East, he says of the Buddhist priests: “Their 
piety is an illusion; their pretensions a fraud; 
they are the outcasts of society; the expression on 
their faces is one of idiotic absorption. This is 
not surprising, for the mass-book is a dead letter 
to them; it is written in a strange language which 
they can no more decipher than fly. The words 
they chant are merely equivalents in sound, and 
as used in Chinese are totally devoid of sense.” 
And a missionary goes on to say of this Buddhis¬ 
tic religion which holds in its grasp nearly three 
hundred million people: “The Buddhist priests 
have a blank idiotic look on their face; they are 
no more influenced by moral sense than are the 
waves of the sea; they know no sense of sin, and 
feel no need of a Saviour themselves. How, then, 
could they be a guide to others who are in need of 
a Saviour?” A few years ago this item appeared 
in a Foo-chow paper, which is Buddhism up to 
date, over against the claims of men like Fielding, 
who tells us that Buddhism has “such high mor¬ 
ality that even Christians may go to school to 
Buddha:” “On the eighth day of the fourth month 
the Buddhist priests in the vicinity of the west 
gate in Dung Keng met in their yearly conclave, 


THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY 


45 


one purpose being to ordain Buddhist priests, by 
the rite of burning marks upon their heads. 
Among the priests was one from Gua Sang village. 
This man was accused of stealing a priestly gar¬ 
ment worth two dollars. The theft was committed 
last year. He was seized by the assembled priests, 
and before the crowd his eyes were gouged out. 
They then placed piles of wood about him and 
burned him to death.” That is Buddhism in China 
yesterday. Some thought that Mohammedanism 
had changed its nature because the Turks de¬ 
clared a constitution, because the Persians were 
grasping for a parliament, because there are col¬ 
leges and institutions of learning scattered over 
the Mohammedan world. But read the report of 
Armenian massacres and of medieval tortures be¬ 
ing carried out by the very Turks who swore on 
the constitution and by the Koran that they would 
uphold liberty, equality, fraternity. I challenge 
anyone who has travelled around the world to 
deny that in their origin, in their influence, in 
their character, there is a great and lasting and 
unchangeable gulf between the non-Christian re¬ 
ligions and the Christian religion. They are dis¬ 
tinct in spite of much that is un-Christian in 
Christendom. 

In the next place, the two bodies are both in 
motion. There was a time when Christianity, too, 
was largely stagnant. There was a time when 
the Church of Jesus Christ did not regard her 
Master’s last commission. There was a time when 
Mohammedanism could have taught us what it 


46 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

was to have a great missionary movement. There 
was a time when Christianity might have gone to 
school with Buddhism to learn the real missionary 
spirit. But today Christianity is in motion. At 
last the Church of Jesus Christ has begun, not to 
play at missions, but to take hold of missions as 
a great, divine task. 

“Ye that are men now serve Him, 

Against unnumbered foes, 

Your courage rise with danger, 

And strength to strength oppose.” 

That is the spirit of the Church of Jesus Christ 
today. And just as surely as Christianity is in 
motion, the other religions are in motion. It is 
the impact of two moving bodies, or of one moving 
body against all the other non-Christian religions. 
Take Hinduism, for example. If anything is true 
of Hinduism it is that Hinduism was built up in 
watertight compartments of caste, confined itself 
to one great peninsula, absorbed but never went 
out—a great and mighty system, hoary with age 
and self-satisfied. Hinduism today is no longer 
stagnant; Hinduism today is rampant. 

Vivakananda and other Swamis are going out 
seeking whom they may lure into the immense 
net of Hinduism. Hinduism is no longer esoteric, 
but popular and tries to be modern; it has bor¬ 
rowed the plumes of Christianity, and faces us as 
a mighty, new, reformed Hinduism. Why, you 
can no more recognize in the talk of these re¬ 
formed Hindus the old Hindu religion than 
you can recognize in the broken line along the 


THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY 


47 


shores of Sicily, Messina as it was before the 
earthquake. It is all changed. 

Buddhism has always been a missionary reli¬ 
gion. It came to Ceylon from India 250 years be¬ 
fore Jesus Christ was born. It was a missionary 
religion in China before the Apostle Paul became 
a missionary. It had already reached Japan be¬ 
fore Mohammed was born, and before Mohammed 
died Buddhism had grasped the whole of Siam. 
In the middle ages Turkestan and Central Asia 
were the battleground between Buddhism, Islam 
and Christianity, and the statistics of religion 
given today for the Russian empire show that 
year by year the mighty struggle between these 
three greatest religions of the world is still go¬ 
ing on. 

Of all the non-Christian religions, perhaps, 
Islam has shown most of all the power of an im¬ 
mense and lasting momentum. We have a mis¬ 
sionary propagandism; we have committees and 
boards and treasuries; we have literature and en¬ 
thusiasm; but where can you point in Christen¬ 
dom to a missionary spirit like that which has 
breathed throughout the Mohammedan world for 
thirteen centuries? Their Laymen's Missionary 
Movement does not have its tenth anniversary, 
but its thirteen hundredth! 

Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief, 

Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, 

—the whole laity of the Moslem word has been 
missionary in Africa and Asia for all these cen- 


48 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

turies, until today there are over two hundred mil¬ 
lion nominal Mohammedans. Moslems are not in¬ 
active today. They are publishing Thomas Car¬ 
lyle's The Hero as Prophet , and selling it for 
two annas on the streets of Lahore. They are 
copying the Koran and printing it for the pagan 
tribes in the heart of Africa. They are winning 
over, against Christian missions in some parts of 
Africa, thousands and tens of thousands of con¬ 
verts. The non-Christian religions, the greatest 
of them, are in motion today. 

Not only are the non-Christian religions in mo¬ 
tion, but the men of the yellow robe and the men 
of the green turban are coming into actual con¬ 
tact and clash and conflict with Christian mission¬ 
aries, and both of them are claiming the victory. 
It is a clash of arms such as the world has never 
heard, such as history has never seen. Mission¬ 
ary statesmen in Africa tell you that within two 
decades there will be no paganism left in Africa, 
but Christianity and Islam will divide between 
them the whole of the Dark Continent. Shall the 
religion of the loveless Allah, the religion of the 
lifeless creed, the religion of the degraded home, 
hold in its grasp a whole continent? The call of 
God’s providence and the command of Christ, and 
the very existence of our Christianity demand im¬ 
mediate, world-wide missionary impact on the 
part of Christianity with the non-Christian reli¬ 
gions of the world. 

The effect of that impact leaves no uncertainty 
of the result. The Christian religion, being not of 


THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY 


49 


the same nature as the other religions, need fear 
no conflict with the other religions of the earth. 
He who said, “All power is given unto me in 
heaven and on earth,” said so when Buddhism was 
500 years old, when Hinduism was many centuries 
old and when Mohammedanism, though not yet 
arisen, already existed in the very germ, because 
the Apostle Paul, one might say, describes people 
who could not be better described if we wished to 
characterize in a sentence the Moslem world to¬ 
day when he said, “For many walk of whom I 
have often told you, and now tell you even weep¬ 
ing, that they are the enemies of the Cross of 
Christ, whose end is perdition, whose god is their 
belly, who glory in their shame, who mind earthly 
things”—the five points of Islam: anti-Christian, 
hopeless, sensual, with low ideals, and without 
spirituality—a religion of the earth, earthy. The 
conflict, the impact of Christianity upon the 
non-Christian world may well be measured in its 
impact and conflict with Mohammedanism. 

What has been the result of an impact which 
has only taken place for a very few years through 
missions, and only for a very few decades through 
Christian government, law and commerce ? In the 
Mohammedan world you may see first of all 
the effect of that tremendous impact politically. 
Seven-eighths of the population of the Mohamme¬ 
dan world under the flags of Christian govern¬ 
ments. Ninety-one million Mohammedans under 
the Union Jack, which bears the symbol of the 
Crucified. As a Mohammedan told me at Bagdad, 


50 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

when I said, “Why do you spit when you see that 
flag?”—“It is not England that I hate; but why 
should England put the symbol of the Cross on 
her flag and over our country?” Yes, why should 
England put the symbol of the Cross on her flag, 
except that she owes her strength, and owes her 
glory, and owes her life, and owes her enterprise 
to that same Cross of Jesus Christ, towering o’er 
the wrecks of time. 

The impact of Christianity has not only been 
political, but social. The former may not have 
been an impact always for good, although it has 
thrown open the doors to Christian missions. But 
the impact of Christianity has been social. The 
great social reforms now going on in the Moham¬ 
medan world are indicative that Christianity and 
Christian missions have not been without influ¬ 
ence in Moslem lands. When the women of 
Russia present a petition to the Duma to be de¬ 
livered from the oppression of their husbands, 
such a petition is the direct result of the impact 
of Christian thought. When the new constitution 
is proclaimed in Turkey, and there is a new era of 
liberty, it is the result of Robert College, Beirut 
College, and Assiut College, and the impact of 
Christian education throughout the Mohammedan 
world. Socially the Mohammedan world is no 
longer stolid and stagnant, but receptive, and 
looking all around the horizon to see how they can 
appropriate our social system without giving up 
their book and their prophet. But they can no 
more easily appropriate our social system, which 


THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY 


51 


is full of the life of Christ, without giving up their 
book and their prophet than pick out the num- 
mulite fossils from the limestone cliffs in the Mu- 
kattam hills. They are embedded. They stand or 
fall together. That is why Jesus Christ is spoken 
of by John, the beloved disciple, as coming not to 
bring peace, but the sword. That is why John 
says, “For this purpose was the Son of God mani¬ 
fested, that He might destroy the works of the 
devil.” In so far as the non-Christian religions 
have in them the evidence of God’s spirit, in so far 
as the non-Christian religions have shared in the 
ethics of Christianity, like Confucianism in its 
honor to father and mother, in so far they will 
stand the test; but in so far as the non-Christian 
religions are without Christ and without hope and 
without God, the habitations of cruelty; in so far 
as those who hold them, as Ian Keith Falconer 
said, “suffer the horrors of heathenism and 
Islamin so far Jesus Christ has come to destroy 
the works of the devil. 

The Christian impact has also been an impact 
moral and spiritual. We are sometimes told that 
the work among Mohammedans is without suc¬ 
cess ; that there have been no Mohammedans con¬ 
verted by the power of Christian missions. But 
we may remember that the first conversion from 
Islam to Christ took place even before Mohammed 
died. One of Mohammed’s own companions left 
Arabia and went to Abyssinia, and there the im¬ 
pact of a living Christianity, although partly dead, 
the impact of Abyssinian Christianity opened the 


52 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

eyes of that Arab, Obeid Allah bin Jahsh, and he 
wrote back to Mohammed, as the Arabs them¬ 
selves relate, “I now see clearly, and you are still 
blinking.” Would that Mohammed himself had 
received that message from the impact of one of 
his disciples with a living soul in Christian Abys¬ 
sinia ! That first convert has been added to 
throughout the centuries until today you can 
count in Persia, and Arabia, and Turkestan, yes, 
and Bokhara and Afghanistan, men, if not by the 
score, yet by the ones and twos and tens, who have 
laid down their lives rather than deny the name 
of our Lord Jesus Christ. In India there are thou¬ 
sands of converts and two hundred preachers of 
the Gospel who were formerly Mohammedans. In 
Java there are no less than forty thousand living 
converts from Islam gathered into churches, and 
many of these churches are self-supporting. If 
after only half a century of such missionary effort 
as we have given to the Mohammedan problem, 
God has given us such evident victories, what will 
not be the victory of the impact when Christian¬ 
ity, a living Christianity, comes face to face with 
the whole Mohammedan problem in Africa and in 
Asia? The strength of that impact is not meas¬ 
ured by our gifts to missions, by the endowments 
of our institutions or the numbers who attend our 
colleges. The strength of that impact is not meas¬ 
ured by the printed page scattered over the Mo¬ 
hammedan world. The strength of that impact 
rests solely and wholly in the strength of Calvary. 
The Mohammedan religion and other religions 


THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY 


53 


may have many great truths, but the missing link 
in the Moslem’s creed, and all creeds of the non- 
Christian world, is the Cross of Jesus Christ. The 
Buddhist religion may elevate, almost deify, law 
and order, but the Buddhist faith knows nothing 
of the gospel of the Crucified. Hinduism knows of 
a million incarnations, but is ignorant of the one 
great Incarnation at Bethlehem. 

The Cross of Calvary, because it reconciles the 
three greatest things in the world—the greatest 
thing in God, which is love; the greatest thing in 
the world, the moral law; and the greatest mys¬ 
tery of humanity, sin—will win against all other 
religions. Because Calvary unites these three, 
and solves the problem philosophically, not only, 
but practically for every one of us, so that face to 
face with that Cross we say, “My Lord and my 
God,” and walk in his footsteps; so that face to 
face with that Cross life is no longer a mystery 
but a glorious transfiguration; therefore, the 
Cross of Jesus Christ will prevail until the king¬ 
doms of this world shall have become the King¬ 
dom of our Lord and of his Christ. 

“Uplifted are the gates of brass, 

The bars of iron yield, 

To let the King of Glory pass, 

The Cross hath won the field.” 






V 


“I am astonished you are hastily 
shifting like this, deserting Him who 
called you by Christ’s grace and going 
over to another gospel. It simply means 
that certain individuals are unsettling 
you; they want to distort the gospel of 
Christ. Now, even though it were my¬ 
self or some angel from heaven, whoever 
preaches a gospel that contradicts the 
gospel I preached to you, God’s curse be 
on him! I have said it before, and I now 
repeat it: whoever preaches a gospel to 
you that contradicts the gospel you have 
already received, God’s curse be on him! 
—Gal. 1: 6-9 (Moffatt’s Translation). 




























CHAPTER V 


What Is the Apostolic Gospel? 

4 i f I 1 HE indifference of great masses of men 
today to dogma,” writes Mr. Edwin Be- 
**■ van in the International Review of 
Missions , “while they still reverence 
Christian ethical ideals, is something which con¬ 
fronts the friends of missions with a problematic 
situation.” He then goes on to show, in his ar¬ 
ticle entitled The Apostolic Gospel , that any at¬ 
tempt to get away from apostolic dogma and go 
back to Jesus simply as the revealer of moral 
value is an impossibility. 

We must either accept the apostolic interpre¬ 
tation of Christianity or give up any attempt to 
set Jesus on an eminence above all other good 
men. The old cry “Back to Christ” often means 
“away from Paul and his teaching.” The Sermon 
on the Mount, however, is not the earliest Chris¬ 
tian document. If we consider the chronology of 
the New Testament books, it is a striking fact 
that the doctrinal epistles,—Galatians, Corin¬ 
thians, Romans,—were written and circulated 
among the churches before the Good News was 
recorded by Mark or Luke. The first letter of 
Paul to the Corinthians was written 56 A. D.; the 
common date assigned to Matthew’s Gospel is be¬ 
tween 70 and 90 A. D. 


58 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


The Christian teaching, therefore, of the apos¬ 
tles, and the doctrine accepted by the early 
Church, is to be found not only nor first in the 
Synoptics, but in the Epistles. They tell us of the 
finished work of Christ. They give him the pre¬ 
eminence above all; they find the center of their 
teaching in his death and resurrection; their glory 
in the Cross. 

The apparent foolishness of this message did 
not disconcert them or lead to compromise. The 
Jews demanded miracles and the Greeks were mad 
in their search for philosophy. Paul determined 
to disregard the wisdom of both worlds, Jew and 
Gentile, and to proclaim a Christ crucified, al¬ 
though a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolish¬ 
ness to the Gentiles. In the great resurrection 
chapter he gives us the theme of his preaching as 
well as the hope of his salvation and ours. “I de¬ 
livered unto you first of all that which I also re¬ 
ceived, that Christ died for our sins according to 
the Scriptures.” In a single sentence he confirms 
the historicity of the death of Jesus, asserts its 
fundamental character, and gives its supreme sig¬ 
nificance. All three of these are today called in 
question, discounted, or explained away. 

In the non-Christian world the teaching of the 
Cross is still the stumbling-block and foolishness. 
The Moslem reads in his Koran (Surah on Women, 
vs. 155): “God hath stamped on them their un¬ 
belief * * * * for their saying, Verily we have 
killed the Messiah Jesus, the son of Mary, the 
apostle of God, but they did not kill him and they 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


59 


did not crucify him, but a similtude was made for 
them.” In this respect the Moslem teaching is 
perhaps borrowed from that of the early Gnostics. 
In various forms the idea that Christ did not 
really die, but swooned and came to life again 
without tasting death, has been taken up even in 
modern days. The infamous novel by George 
Moore entitled The Brook Kerith is based on the 
same illusions. 

And where men admit the fact of Christ’s 
death on the cross they still stumble because of its 
implications. Are not Christian Science and New 
Thought and other modern cults saying today, 
“Any God except one who died on the Cross?” 
Yet it was the Lamb slain, who is the object of 
all heaven’s worship, in John’s Revelation. The 
Sunday School Times recently published a car¬ 
toon representing civilization as a gentleman of 
culture seated in his home with the morning news¬ 
paper open before him. His wife, represented as 
Christianity, was about to hang on the wall of 
their home a picture of the Crucified, with the in¬ 
scription “Redemption Through Christ’s Atoning 
Blood.” Civilization, however, remarks: “Now 
that we have decided to be one, you will oblige me 
by removing that from the wall of our home.” But 
a Christianity without Christ crucified as its cen¬ 
tral doctrine and supreme hope is a contradiction 
of terms. We know that Jesus Christ died and 
why He died from the Scriptures. 

The witness of pagan writers, entirely apart 
from the New Testament record, has been gath- 


60 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


ered by Samuel Stokes, a missionary in India. He 
gives quotations from Tacitus, the historian Pliny, 
the Roman governor Suetonius, and others, who 
record as a matter of well-known history that 
Jesus of Nazareth was put to death by Pontius 
Pilato and crucified as a criminal. The famous 
passage in Josephus’ Antiquities, Chapter 
XVIII, Part 3, was once called in question as not 
being authentic. Its genuineness has now been 
admitted by Harnack and others. It also gives 
independent witness, therefore, to the death of 
Jesus. In the Jewish Encyclopedia, article on 
Jesus Christ, it is said: “He was executed on the 
eve of the Passover Festival.” The death of Jesus 
was foretold in Old Testament prophecy, and 
when Paul says, “He died according to the Scrip¬ 
tures, 1 ” he doubtless referred to all the passages 
in the Old Testament of the suffering Messiah, 
wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our 
iniquities. Not only in the fifty-third chapter of 
Isaiah, in the twenty-second Psalm, and in the 
thirteenth chapter of Zechariah do we have this 
picture, but perhaps Paul was not unmindful of the 
great unconscious prophecy of the heathen world 
by Plato, 429 B. C., in his Politia, Vol. IV, p. 74. 
He describes the perfect, righteous man who is to 
be the world’s deliverer, in these terms: “Who 
without doing any wrong may assume the appear¬ 
ance of the grossest injustice; yea, who shall be 
scourged, fettered, tortured, deprived of his 
eyes, and after having endured all possible suf- 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


61 


ferings, fastened to a post must restore again the 
beginning and prototype of righteousness.” 

In addition to this testimony of the Scriptures 
we have the witness of the Lord’s Supper, an out¬ 
ward and visible sign of something that occurred 
in the breaking of His body and the pouring out of 
His blood. The evidence of such an unbroken tradi¬ 
tion coming down the centuries in every branch 
of the Christian church cannot be gainsaid. 

Moreover, the mere sign of the cross is a re¬ 
markable testimony to the historicity of the cru¬ 
cifixion. Once it was a symbol of shame and 
degradation; only the criminal and the outcast 
were associated with it; the curse of God and of 
man rested on it. This sign of the cross has now 
become the symbol of honor and glory, of pride 
and prestige. We see it on national flags, in crosses 
of honor, in decorations of valor, and the ministry 
of friendship and relief is carried on under the 
banner of the Red Cross. 

All this is inexplicable unless the cross has 
been dignified, transfigured, glorified by Him who 
hung upon it for our sin. The historicity of the 
death of Jesus is established by all these proofs. 
He died according to the Scriptures, except for 
those who still dare to put the testimony of one 
obscure Koran verse against all the historic evi¬ 
dence of Jew and Christian and pagan writings. 

In stating the content of the Apostolic Gospel, 
Paul says that the death of Christ holds the fun¬ 
damental place in Christian teaching. “I deliv¬ 
ered unto you first of all”—the Greek word signi- 


62 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

fies before everything else , or as belonging to the 
weightiest articles of the faith. In the Septua- 
gint the same phrase is used in Gen. 33: 2, where 
Jacob places the two maid-servants and their chil¬ 
dren in the very front of his cavalcade to meet 
Esau. And again the same Greek words are used 
regarding David (2 Sam. 5:8), where he says: 
“Whosover smiteth the Jebusites first.” Paul evi¬ 
dently means to say that the death of Christ for 
our sins is of the first importance. It is the cor¬ 
nerstone and keystone of Paul’s Christianity. In 
Weymouth’s Version the passage is rendered, 
“For I repeat to you the all-important fact which 
also I have been taught, that Christ died for our 
sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” 

The importance of the death of Jesus Christ 
as the fundamental fact in the New Testament is 
shown by the place it occupies. One-third of the 
New Testament matter deals with the story of the 
cross and the atonement. Matthew devotes two 
long chapters to the trial and death of Jesus; in 
Mark the two longest chapters relate to this 
event; one-seventh of the entire text of Luke is 
taken up with the same story, and in John’s Gos¬ 
pel the shadow of the cross falls on the scene al¬ 
most at the outset, while one-half of the narrative 
deals with the last week of Jesus’ life. 

In the Apostles’ preaching as recorded in the 
Acts and the Epistles their one theme seems to 
have been Christ crucified. Peter (Acts 10: 38- 
43) voices the message than which they had no 
other, the Good News of peace through Jesus 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


63 


Christ which spread throughout the length and 
breadth of Judea and was carried all over the 
Roman Empire: 

“How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy 
Spirit and with power, so that he went about everywhere 
doing acts of kindness, and curing all who were being con¬ 
tinually oppressed by the devil—for God was with Jesus. 

• And we are witnesses as to all that he did both in the 
country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. But they even put 
him to death by crucifixion. That same Jesus God raised 
to life on the third day, and permitted him to appear un¬ 
mistakably, not to al the people, but to witnesses—men 
previously chosen by God—namely, to us, who ate and 
drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he has 
commanded us to preach to the people and solemnly de¬ 
clare that this is he who has been appointed by God to be 
the judge of the living and the dead. To him all the 
prophets bear witness, and testify that through his name 
all who believe in him receive the forgiveness of their 
sins.” 

Paul at Corinth determined to know nothing 
in his preaching save Jesus Christ and Him cru¬ 
cified. The very word “cross” was used so fre¬ 
quently that it became the synonym for “Chris¬ 
tianity.” The preaching of the cross, the offence 
of the cross, the glory of the cross, the power of 
the cross,—all these phrases indicate the place 
this doctrine had in Apostolic preaching. The two 
Christian sacraments are without significance, 
without symbolism, without mystic meaning, ex¬ 
cept they refer to the death of Christ. We are 
buried with Him in baptism; we partake of his 
broken body and shed blood; it is the washing of 
regeneration that refers to the washing away of 
our sins. We are to testify to the fact and the 
significance of the Lord’s death till He come. 


64 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


In other words, the most solemn office and the 
deepest mystery of the Christian Church gather 
around the cross, and the Crucified. The same 
witness is borne by the hymnody of the Church 
Catholic throughout the ages. The death of 
Christ has been the theme of Christian song dur¬ 
ing the persecutions of the early Church when 
they sang praises to their dying Lord in the cata¬ 
combs, until the day of the modern revival and 
the Salvation Army. Take away the death of 
Christ and the best hymns of the Christian 
Church are without significance. It was with deep 
insight that Sir John Bowring, British consul gen¬ 
eral at Canton, China, wrote in 1823: 

“In the cross of Christ I glory, 

Towering o’er the wrecks of time; 

All the light of sacred story 

Gathers round its head sublime.” 

The Church of the Redeemed when they sing the 
new song, still celebrate the old, old story. 

“And I looked, and heard what seemed to be the 
voices of countless angels on every side of the throne, and 
of the living creatures and the Elders. Their number was 
myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, and in 
loud voices they were singing. It is fitting that the Lamb 
which has been offered in sacrifice should receive all power 
and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory 
and blessing. And as for every created thing in heaven 
and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and 
everything that was in any of these, I heard them say, 

“To Him who is seated on the throne, 

And to the Lamb, 

Be ascribed all blessing and honor 

And glory and might 

Until the Ages of the Ages!” 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


65 


Take away the death of Christ from your creed 
and you destroy Christianity. He draws all men 
unto himself because He was lifted up on the 
cross. Deny the significance of the crucifixion 
and the whole New Testament becomes a scrap of 
paper, for it is no New Testament, no new cove¬ 
nant except in his blood. Without that blood there 
is no hope for the sinner and no joy for the be¬ 
liever. 

Paul therefore points out, in the third place, 
the supreme significance of the death of Christ. 
He died for our sins according to the Scriptures. 
There is no other way to explain the death of 
Christ than from the Scriptures. It is inexplica¬ 
ble that God did not deliver Him from such death, 
that He did not make his escape, as Moslems aver, 
unless there was a necessity and high moral pur¬ 
pose, a divine purpose, in his death. When Paul 
said that Christ died for our sins according to the 
Scriptures he referred to the Old Testament, its 
types and symbols, its promises and prophecies, 
its portraiture of the suffering Messiah, without 
the shedding of whose blood there could be no re¬ 
mission of sins. Whatever Paul’s interpretation 
is of the doctrine of the atonement, he himself 
claims that it is based on the Scriptures,—that 
which he had received he delivered. Pauline 
Christianity is rooted in the Old Testament. His 
Good News was the fulfillment of the promise 
made unto the fathers. 

It is impossible to eliminate certain phrases 
from the Synoptic Gospels which are just as clear 


66 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


in their teaching regarding the significance of the 
death of Christ as is John’s Gospel and the state¬ 
ments of the apostle in his epistles. For example, 
what can be the significance of “The Son of man 
came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, 
and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matth. 
20: 28), unless it be to the sacrificial death of 
Christ as the ransom for sin? The apostolic in¬ 
terpretation of the death of Jesus as necessary, 
vicarious, and propitiatory was recorded chrono¬ 
logically long before the record of the Gospel. This 
interpretation therefore of the death of Jesus is 
not a later addition, but is the earliest interpreta¬ 
tion we have. 

In A. D. 53, that is, twenty years after the cru¬ 
cifixion, Paul writes: 

“For while we were yet weak, in due season Christ 
died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man 
will one die; for peradventure for the good man some one 
would even dare to die. But God commendeth his own 
love toward us, in that, when we were yet sinners, Christ 
died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his 
blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God through 
him. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled 
to God through the death of his Son, much more, being 
reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Rom. 5: 6-10). 

To the Corinthian church he writes: 

“For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we 
thus judge, that if one died for all, therefore all died;” 

And again, 

“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto him- 
self * * * him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our 
behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God 
in him.” 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


67 


The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
clearly teaches that Christ’s one sacrifice on the 
cross does away with sin, that He is our only high 
priest, that his blood has cleansing power, and 
that the new covenant owes its validity solely to 
the death of Christ. The Mosaic sacrifices were of 
small value—what they typified Christ fulfilled. 
Peter in his first epistle has the same Gospel. He 
speaks of Jesus who himself carried in his own 
body the burden of our sins to the cross so that 
we, having died so far as our sins are concerned, 
may live righteous lives. By his wounds ours have 
been healed. He also has no other Gospel than the 
Gospel of the death of Christ for our sins accord¬ 
ing to the Scriptures. 

John writes concerning Christ that “He is the 
propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, 
but also for the whole world;” “He laid down his 
life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for 
the brethren;” “God sent his Son to be the propi¬ 
tiation for our sins.” The first name given to 
Jesus in the Gospel of John is “the Lamb of God, 
that taketh away the sin of the world,” and in the 
last chapter of the New Testament eternal life is 
found only for those whose names are written in 
the Lamb’s book, and who drink of the river of 
the water of life which proceedeth from the 
throne of the Lamb. The word “Lamb” in the 
Gospels has no significance and no power over hu¬ 
man hearts unless it refers to the sacrificial Lamb 
of the Old Testament and the shedding of blood 


68 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

for the removal of guilt and transgression. This 
is the Good News, the only Good News, for sin¬ 
ners. 

“What can wash away my sin? 

Nothing but the blood of Jesus; 

What can make me whole again? 

Nothing but the blood of Jesus; 

Oh, precious is the flow 

That makes me white as snow; 

No other fount I know; 

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” 

So important, so supreme, is the place of the 
atonement in the apostles’ thought and preaching 
that it seems incredible for anyone to accept the 
New Testament and then reject the very kernel 
of its teaching. “It will be admitted by most 
Christians,” says Dr. Denney in his book entitled 
The Atonement and the Modern Mind , that if 
the atonement, quite apart from precise definition 
of it, is anything to the mind, it is everything. It 
is the most profound of all truths and most crea¬ 
tive. It determines more than anything else our 
conception of God, of man, of history and even of 
nature; it determines them, for we must bring 
them all in some way into accord with it. It is the 
inspiration of all thought, the key, in the last re¬ 
sort, to all suffering. * * * The atonement is a 
reality of such a sort that it can make no compro¬ 
mise. The man who fights it knows that he is 
fighting for his life and puts all his strength into 
the battle. To surrender is literally to give him¬ 
self up, to cease to be the man he is and become 
another man. For the modern mind, therefore, as 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


69 


for the ancient, the attraction and the repulsion 
of Christianity are concentrated on the same 
point; the Cross of Christ is man’s only glory or 
it is his final stumbling-block.” 

The story is told of Mr. Moody that when he 
was visiting in Europe a young minister came to 
him and said: “Moody, what makes the difference 
between your success in preaching and mine? 
Either you are right and I am wrong, or I am 
right and you are wrong.” 

Said Moody, “I don’t know what the difference 
is, for you have heard me and I have never heard 
you preach. What is the difference ?” 

And the other answered: “You make a good 
deal out of the death of Christ, and I don’t make 
anything out of it. I don’t think it has anything 
to do with it. I preach life.” 

Said Mr. Moody, “What do you do with this: 
‘He hath borne our sins in his own body on the 
tree’ ?” 

Said he, “I never preached that.” 

Said Mr. Moody, “What do you do with this: 
‘He was wounded for our transgressions; he was 
bruised for our iniquities, and with his stripes we 
are healed’ ?” 

Said he, “I never preached that.” 

“Well,” said Mr. Moody again, “what do you do 
with this, ‘Without the shedding of blood, there is 
no remission’?” 

Said he, “I never preached that.” 

Mr. Moody then asked him, “What do you 
preach ?” 


70 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


“Well,” said he, “I preach a moral essay.” 

Said Mr. Moody, “My friend, if you take the 
blood out of the Bible, it is all a myth to me.” 

Said he, “I think the whole thing is a sham.” 

“Then,” said Moody, “I advise you to get out 
of the ministry very quickly; I would not preach 
a sham. If the Bible is untrue, let us stop preach¬ 
ing, and come out at once like men and fight 
against it if it is a sham and untrue; but if these 
things are true, and Jesus Christ left heaven and 
came into this world to shed his blood and save 
sinners, then let us lay hold of it and preach it, in 
season and out of season.” 

The apostolic Gospel to Paul and his success¬ 
ors, and to every evangelist and every missionary, 
is a personal message and a personal Gospel in the 
deepest sense. Paul spoke of it as my Gospel. “/ 
received) it,” “/ delivered it,” he wrote. Those 
who have not received it in their own hearts as 
the final message and the saving message of God’s 
grace can never deliver it to others. 

In the life of Dr. Chatter jee, A Prince of 
the Church in India , by Dr. Ewing, the story of 
this Bengal Brahmin’s conversion suggests much 
anxious thinking for those modern missionaries 
who attempt to relegate the cross and the atone¬ 
ment to a subordinate place. Dr. Chatter jee ex¬ 
plains what was the compelling force which in¬ 
duced him to leave home and country and honor 
by accepting Christian baptism. He admits the 
attraction of Christ’s blameless life and his per¬ 
fect teaching, but, says he, “the doctrine which 


THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL 


71 


decided me to embrace the Christian religion, and 
make a public confession of my faith, was the doc¬ 
trine of the vicarious death and suffering of 
Christ. I felt myself a sinner, and found in Christ 
one who had died for my sins, paid the penalty 
due my sins.” “For by grace are ye saved by 
faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of 
God.” 

He goes on to say that after all his years of ex¬ 
perience as a leader of the Indian church the 
atonement has become “in my thinking and in my 
life the great and sole differentiating line between 
Christianity and all other religions, so that when 
I became a Christian I felt, and feel it most 
strongly now, that a God all mercy is a God un¬ 
just. * * * This continues to be my creed to this 
day.” 

The true apostolic succession is not a matter 
of method or of ordination or of ecclesiastical con¬ 
nection, but of the character of our message. Have 
we received first of all, and delivered first of all, 
the news of Christ’s death for sin? Do we inter¬ 
pret that death not in terms of human philosophy, 
but in terms of the Old Testament Scriptures? 
Does the death of Christ hold the foremost place 
in our preaching, in our thinking, and in our mis¬ 
sionary program ? 


VI 

“From that time Jesus began to show 
his disciples that he had to leave for 
Jerusalem and endure great suffering at 
the hands of the elders and high priests 
and scribes, and be killed and raised on 
the third day. Peter took him and began 
to reprove him for it; ‘God forbid, Lord,’ 
he said, ‘This must not be.’ But he turned 
and said to Peter, ‘Get thee behind me, 
you satan! You are a hindrance to me! 
Your outlook is not God’s, but man’s.”— 
Matt. 16:21-23 (Moffatt’s Translation). 


\ 


CHAPTER VI 


The Stumbling-Block of the Cross* 

I T was the deliberate judgment of Dr. James 
Denny when he wrote on the place and inter¬ 
pretation in the New Testament of the Death 
of Christ, some years ago, that the atonement 
did not have the place assigned to it, either in 
modern preaching or in theology, which it has in 
the New Testament, and that the proportion given 
to it in average current Christianity was not that 
of the apostles in their preaching. Those who 
have carefully read his book must admit that the 
importance of the death of Christ to Christian 
theology and life cannot be exaggerated. Through¬ 
out the entire New Testament the Cross domi¬ 
nates everything . It interprets everything, and 
it puts all things in their true relations to each 
other. The death of Christ is the central truth in 
the New Testament, and therefore, as Denny re¬ 
marks, “both for the propagation and for the 
scientific construction of the Christian religion, 
the death of Christ is of supreme importance.” 
How is this fact related to the Moslem problem? 
Is the death of Christ and his atoning work our 
supreme message? Ought it to be our first mes¬ 
sage? 

The fundamental difference between Islam and 
Christianity is the absence in the former of the 


* Cf. Gal. 5: 11, and 1 Cor. 1: 23 R. V. 



76 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

doctrine of the Cross. The Cross of Christ is the 
missing link in the Moslem’s creed, and not only 
in the Koran and in the early traditions, but in 
the practical experience of every missionary, espe¬ 
cially in lands that are wholly Moslem, nothing 
seems to stand out more prominently than Islam’s 
hatred of the Cross. The Koran gives Jesus 
Christ a high place among the prophets, and con¬ 
fers on Him names and titles which, if rightly in¬ 
terpreted, would place Him above them all, and 
yet it does so only by denying his death and his 
atonement. Modern Islam differs in no respect 
from orthodox Islam in this particular, and al¬ 
though the followers of the new Islam may speak 
in the highest terms of Jesus Christ as regards 
his character, his miracles and his influence on 
history, they occupy the orthodox position in this 
respect; nor do they find a place in their doctrine 
of salvation for Christ’s atonement. A recent 
writer, and a missionary of long experience in 
Persia, goes so far as to say that there is “not a 
single important fact in the life, person and work 
of our Savior which is not ignored, perverted, or 
denied by Islam.” Their chief denial, however, is 
of his death. There are three passages in the 
Koran which seem to indicate that Christ did die: 

“But they (the Jews) were crafty, and God was 
crafty, for God is the best of crafty ones! When God said, 
‘0 Jesus! I will make thee die and take thee up again to 
me, and will clear thee of those who misbelieve, and will 
make those who follow thee above those who misbelieve, 
at the day of judgment, then to me is your return. I will 
decide between you concerning that wherein ye disagree. 


STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 


77 


And as for those who misbelieve, I will punish them with 
grievous punishment in this world and the next, and they 
shall have none to help them.’ But as for those who be¬ 
lieve and do what is right, He will pay them their reward, 
for God loves not the unjust ” (Surah 3: 47-50). 

“And peace upon me the day I was born, and the day 
I die, and the day I shall be raised up alive” (Surah 19:34). 

“And I was a witness against them so long as I was 
amongst them, but when Thou didst cause me to die, Thou 
wert the Watcher over them, for Thou art witness over 
all” (Surah 5: 117). 

These texts certainly seem to teach that Jesus 
died. 

Yet, in spite of them, Moslems everywhere 
quote the other verse when they deal with Chris¬ 
tians, whom they accuse of misbelief: 

“And for their misbelief, and for their saying about 
Mary a mighty calumny, and for their saying, ‘Verily, we 
have killed the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle 
of God’ * * * BUT THEY DID NOT KILL HIM AND 
THEY DID NOT CRUCIFY HIM, BUT A SIMILITUDE 
WAS MADE FOR THEM. And verily, those who differ 
about him are in doubt concerning him; they have no 
knowledge concerning him, but only follow an opinion. 
They did not kill him, for sure! Nay, God raised him up 
unto Himself.” (Surah 4: 155, 156). 

In the traditions which have come down to us 
from the prophet himself (or which have been in¬ 
vented by his followers and attributed to Moham¬ 
med) * this denial of the death of Jesus Christ on 
the cross is elaborated. As apparently the death 
of Jesus Christ was both affirmed and denied in 
the Koran, to unify its teaching the only possible 
way of escape was to affirm that although He died 


* Goldziher, “Mohammedanische Studien.” Vol. II. 



78 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


for a few hours or days, He was not crucified. We 
read in Moslem tradition :t 

“And they spat upon Him and put thorns upon Him; 
and they erected the wood to crucify Him upon it. And 
when they came to crucify Him upon the tree, the earth 
was darkened, and God sent angels, and they descended 
between them and between Jesus; and God cast the like¬ 
ness of Jesus upon him who had betrayed Him, and whose 
name was Judas. And they crucified him in His stead, 
and they thought that they crucified Jesus. Then God 
made Jesus to die for three hours, and then raised Him 
up to heaven; and this is the meaning of the Koran verse: 
‘Verily, I will cause Thee to die, and raise Thee unto Me, 
and purify Thee above those who misbelieve.’ ” 

In addition to this, Moslem commentators 
teach that when Christ comes again the second 
time, He will die, emphasizing, as it were, the 
frailty of his human nature, which even after his 
return from glory, and his death for a few hours 
before his ascension, is still subject to death, in 
this also flatly contradicting all the teaching of 
the New Testament that “He died for sin once, 
and death hath no more dominion over Him.” 

Not only do Moslems deny the historical fact 
of the crucifixion, but from the days of Moham¬ 
med himself until now, they have shown a strange 
and strong antipathy, and even a repugnance, to 
the very sign of the Cross. It is related by A1 
Waqidi that Mohammed had such repugnance to 
the very form of the cross that he broke every¬ 
thing brought into his house with that figure upon 
it. This may have been mere superstition, or, as 

f For these traditions and their sources, cf. Zwemer’s 
“The Moslem Christ,” pp. 78-112. 



STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 


79 


Muir remarks, “It may, on the other hand, have 
been symbolical of his extreme aversion to the 
doctrine of the crucifixion.”$ 

According to Abu Hurairah, the prophet said: 
“I swear by heaven it is near when Jesus, the Son 
of Mary, will descend from heaven upon you peo¬ 
ple, a just King, and He will break the cross and 
kill the swine.” In certain books of Moslem law 
it is expressly laid down under the head of theft, 
that if a cross or crucifix is stolen from a church, 
the usual punishment for theft is not incurred; 
although if it be stolen from a private dwelling, 
it is a theft. It is well known to readers of the 
daily press that Turkey and Egypt have never 
been willing to have Red Cross Societies under the 
International Hague Convention regulations, but 
have organized Red Crescent Societies instead. A 
more recent incident illustrating Moslem hatred 
for the cross comes to us from the Sudan in con¬ 
nection with the postal service. The United Em¬ 
pire says: 

“In the early days, the stamps of the Sudan bore a 
water-mark which for many months passed unnoticed by 
their users. But one day a Mohammedan, in an idle mo¬ 
ment, held one of them up to the light, and discovered to 
his dismay that this water-mark bore an obvious resem¬ 
blance to a Maltese cross. Now, to a devout Moslem, any 
suspicion of veneration to the cross of the Christian is not 
only distasteful; it is absolutely forbidden. And here for 
months the Moslem scribes of the Sudan had been plac¬ 
ing their lips, or at least their tongues, to its hidden 
design unknowingly. It may seem a small thing to some 
people, but the world knows what a doleful page of history 
has been written merely because some cartridges were 


t Muir’s “Mohammed.” Vol. Ill, p. 61. 



80 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


greased; and in the Sudan the authorities acted with dis¬ 
cretion. They changed the water-mark. Thus to philate¬ 
lists a Sudan stamp water-marked with a design bearing 
a resemblance to a Maltese cross, is a rather valuable dis¬ 
covery.” 

It is true that educated Moslems are becoming 
ashamed of this repugnance to the symbol of the 
Cross, and try to explain away certain of the early 
traditions or present-day practices. In a supposed 
interview with a newspaper correspondent Sheikh 
Rashid Ridha, of Cairo, utterly denies the story 
related by Charles Doughty regarding Arab boys 
who are taught to defile the Cross, drawn in the 
desert sand.* But the story is true. No man has 
so closely examined and so carefully reported pop¬ 
ular Islam as it exists in Arabia today as this 
prince among explorers. Here are his words: 

“In the evening I had wandered to an oasis side; there 
a flock of the village children soon assembling with swords 
and bats, followed my heels, hooting, ‘0 Nasrany! 0 Nas- 
rany!’ and braving about the kaffir and cutting crosses in 
the sand before me, they spitefully defiled them, shouting 
a villanous carol * * * This behavior in the children was 
some sign of the elders’ meaning from whom doubtless 
they had heard their villainous rhyming.” 

The Armenian massacres afforded other ter¬ 
rible instances of this fanatic hatred of the Cross, 
the details of which can never be published. It is 
true, on the other hand, as Mr. Leeder states, that 
in the Sahara and Tunisia the Cross is used as a 
tattoo mark and in the decoration of weapons, etc. 

* See S. H. Leeder, “Veiled Mysteries of Egyt,” pp. 
323, 324. 



STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 81 

This use of the Cross, however, in certain parts of 
the Moslem world is due either to the fact that it 
has continued in use by tribes which were once 
Christian, or that the symbol is of sinister im¬ 
port. The Tuaregs of the Sahara, as well as the 
Kabyles of North Africa, were undoubtedly once 
Christian.* And as regards the latter explana¬ 
tion, abundant proof exists in such works as those 
of El Buni on magic, talismans and amulets. Near 
the Bab A1 Fatooh in Cairo, Moslem women today 
buy silver amulets specially made for them, con¬ 
sisting of a rude image of the Christ on the Cross, 
and on the back are verses from the Koran! It is 
well-known that these are worn not to honor the 
Christ or the Cross, but with the intention of driv¬ 
ing out demons by the use of a sign which is itself 
considered demonic! 

Not only is the symbol of the cross a stum¬ 
bling-block to the Moslem mind, but the doctrine 
of the cross is an offence. A number of books and 
pamphlets that have recently appeared show this 
antipathy. Halil Halid in his book, “The Crescent 
versus the Cross,” shows how far even the edu¬ 
cated Moslem carries this opposition. He is an 
honorary M. A. of Cambridge and a licentiate of 
the Institute of Law in Constantinople, and writes: 

“Islam also holds different views on the death of 
Christ. Whether historically correct or not, it does not 
admit the possibility of the crucifixion of Christ. It ad¬ 
vances the theory that someone else must have been cru¬ 
cified by mistake in his place, as it cannot reconcile his 
lofty position with the alleged form of his death, a form 


* Hans Visscher, “Across the Sahara,” p. 168. 



82 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


which, to the Moslem mind, only befits criminals. To the 
Moslem mind it is not only sacrilegious, but also illogical 
at once to deify Him and make Him suffer such a death. 
The Christian explanation that ‘Christ suffered that pain¬ 
ful death for our sins’ fails to satisfy the critics of the 
non-Christian world. It is doubtless convenient for many 
Christians to regard the passages of their Scriptures con¬ 
cerning the crucifixion as an insurance policy, and to con¬ 
duct themselves in a manner which is hardly pious, feel¬ 
ing sure that they are safe against hell-fire because Christ 
suffered for their sins. Mussulman critics say ‘what fan¬ 
ciful notions these Christians entertain on this subject! 
They not only state that the One, whom they are to wor¬ 
ship, died such a death, but also make a mournful picture 
out of their notion of crucifixion, representing it by the 
fine arts—a picture which is neither realistic nor aesthe¬ 
tic.’ ” 


Many of the most bitter attacks on Christian¬ 
ity by the Moslem press in recent years have been 
similarly directed against the Cross and its teach¬ 
ing. In a book recently published at Beirut by 
Mohammed Tahir et Tannir, entitled Pagan Ele¬ 
ments in the Christian Religion , the author 
draws a parallel between Krishna and Christ, and 
even illustrates by crude wooden cuts Krishna’s 
death and the death of Christ on the Cross, the 
one with a crown of glory, the other with a crown 
of thorns! The book tries to prove that all Chris¬ 
tian teaching regarding the crucifixion and the 
atonement is not based on historical fact, but was 
borrowed piecemeal from heathenism. Moham¬ 
med Tawfiq Sidqi in a book just published, entitled 
Din Allah , attacks the Christian faith both as 
regards its documents and its dogma, using the 
arguments of modern destructive criticism, with¬ 
out being aware apparently that it is a two-edged 


STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 


83 


sword which would play havoc with the Koran and 
the traditions if its edge were once tried. In the 
introduction he states that Christ is in no sense 
an atonement for sin, and that ideas of sacrifice 
and atonement are only remnants of heathenism. 
He attempts to prove that none of the prophecies 
of the Old Testament, especially not those found 
in Isa. 53, Ps. 22 and Zech. 12: 13, refer in any 
way to Christ or his death on the cross. 

It is interesting to notice, however, how more 
and more the advocates of Islam and the oppo¬ 
nents of Christianity among Moslems are becom¬ 
ing thoroughly aware that the doctrine of the 
Cross is the Gibraltar of the Christian faith, the 
center and pivot of Christian theology, and the 
very foundation of the Christian hope. In the 
last number of a monthly review, published by 
Seyyid Mohammed Rashid Ridha, Al Manar, 
twelve pages are devoted to a rather candid in¬ 
quiry regarding the crucifixion of Christ, and in 
the very introduction of his subject the learned 
author says that “the belief in the crucifixion is 
the foundation of the Christian religion; if it were 
not for its doctrine of the Cross and redemption, 
which are the root of the Christian religion, they 
would not spend time in calling upon men to ac¬ 
cept and embrace it.” The writer goes on to state 
that he has gathered the significance of this doc¬ 
trine and the sum of its teaching by attendance 
at public meetings, and by reading the books of 
Christians, and he sets before his Moslem readers 
this summary: 


84 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 


“Adam, when he transgressed God Most High by eat¬ 
ing from the forbidden tree, became a sinner and all his 
descendants with him, and therefore worthy of punish¬ 
ment in the world to come and of everlasting destruction. 
In consequence all his posterity were reckoned as sinners, 
and worthy also of punishment. And so all his posterity 
were guilty of Adam’s sin. Now, since God Most High 
had the attributes of both justice and mercy, a difficulty 
(far be it from God Most High to be in difficulty!) oc¬ 
curred to Him because of Adam’s transgression; namely, 
that if he should punish Adam for his sin, this would be 
opposed to his mercy, and He would not be merciful! And 
if He did not punish Adam, it would be opposed to his jus¬ 
tice, and He would not be just! As if, since the disobe¬ 
dience of Adam, God spent his time in thinking out a plan 
by which He could combine his justice and his mercy! 
Now, He did not arrive at it until about 1912 years ago 
(God forbid! God forbid!), and the plan was that His Son 
Most High, who is God himself, should tabernacle in the 
womb of a woman from among the sons of Adam, and be 
conceived by her and born from her, and become her child; 
a perfect man since He was her son, and perfect God since 
He was the Son of God, for the Son of God, they say, is 
God; and He was free also from all the sin and the trans¬ 
gression of the sons of Adam. Then after He had lived 
a short time with men, eating what they ate, and drink¬ 
ing what they drank, and enjoying what they enjoyed, and 
suffering as they suffered, He was overpowered by his 
enemies who tried to kill Him by a shameful death, 
namely, the death on the cross, which is cursed in the Holy 
Book. And so He bore the curse and the cross for the re¬ 
demption of humanity and their salvation from their sins, 
as John said in his first epistle: ‘And He is the propitiation 
for our sins, and not for our sins only, but for the sins of 
the whole world.’ (Far be it from God the Lord of glory 
to be so described!)” 

We can see from this literal translation of a 
brief portion of the article in question how fully 
Moslems today are aware that the fundamental 
difference between Islam and Christianity lies in 
the doctrine of the Cross. 


STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 


85 


Following this exposition of the teaching of 
Christians, the article summarizes the objections 
to it as follows: 

1. It is opposed to reason. 

2. It is opposed to theism. How can God, who 
is omnipresent and everlasting, degrade himself 
by dwelling in a virgin’s womb? 

3. It is opposed to God’s knowledge; for the 
plan of salvation—if such it is—was an after¬ 
thought. 

4. It is opposed to both the mercy and justice 
of God; to his mercy because He allowed Christ 
to suffer, being innocent, without delivering Him; 
and to his justice in allowing those who crucified 
Him to do it unpunished. 

5. It leads to impiety, because if this is the 
way of salvation, then no matter how wicked a 
man is he finds deliverance through the cross, and 
will never be punished for his sins. 

6. It is unnecessary. We have never heard it 
stated by any reasonable person, or those who are 
learned in law, that the attribute of justice is 
abrogated by the pardon of a criminal; on the con¬ 
trary, it is considered a virtue to pardon an of¬ 
fender. Why should not God do so? 

From the above it is easy to judge that the 
modern standpoint of Islam is not only opposed to 
the historical fact of the crucifixion, but to the 
historical interpretation of that fact in Christian 
theology. 

The question here arises how can we account 
for Mohammed’s repugnance to the crucifixion? 


86 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

Was it that he desired to defend the reputation of 
Jesus, the greatest prophet before him, from the 
stain which he considered was cast upon it by the 
Jews who boasted that they had slain Him? 
(Surah 4: 156). It may have been that to Mo¬ 
hammed’s mind there was something abhorrent 
in the idea of a prophet being left to the mercy of 
his foes, especially in the case of one of the 
greater prophets. The Koran makes much of how 
God wrought deliverance for Noah, Abraham, Lot 
and others, even by a miracle. It may have been 
that Mohammed, therefore, borrowing an idea of 
certain Christian sects, believed and taught that 
Christ was not crucified. The Basilidians, we are 
told, held that the person crucified was Simon of 
Cyrene; the Cyrentians and Carpocratians, that it 
was one of Jesus’ followers, while the Persian 
heretic Mani taught that it was the prince of dark¬ 
ness himself.* Perhaps there was nothing to pre¬ 
vent Mohammed from adopting this view, as he 
was but imperfectly acquainted with the real doc¬ 
trines of Christianity. We say, perhaps, because 
another view is put forward by Koelle in his philo¬ 
sophical study, on the historical position of Mo- 
hammedanism.f He writes: 

“Mohammed, from his low, earthly standing-point, 
could neither apprehend the unique excellence of the char¬ 
acter of Christ, nor the real nature of his all-sufficient and 
all-comprehending salvation. 

* Cf., Rice, “Crusaders of the Twentieth Century,” 
p. 252. 

t “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” Book III, pp. 
310, 334. 



STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 


87 


“Not want of opportunity, but want of sympathy and 
compatibility, kept him aloof from the religion of Christ. 
His first wife introduced him to her Christian cousin; one 
of his later wives had embraced Christianity in Abyssinia, 
and the most favored of his concubines was a Christian 
damsel from the Copts of Egypt. He was acquainted with 
ascetic monks, and had dealings with learned Bishops of 
the Orthodox Church.” 

Again, Mohammed was not ignorant of the su¬ 
preme importance of the doctrine of the atone¬ 
ment. According to a well-known tradition, he 
said: 

“I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form, and He 
said unto me, ‘O Mohammed, knowest thou on what sub¬ 
ject the highest angels contend?’ I answered, ‘Yes, O my 
Lord, on the subject of atonement, that is to say, on the 
services and degrees which are the cause of the atone¬ 
ment of sins.’ Thereupon the word was addressed to me, 
‘What is atonement?’ I answered, ‘Atonement is the re¬ 
maining in the house of prayer after the service has been 
performed; the going to the meetings on foot; and the 
taking an ablution when trials and troubles befall: who¬ 
ever does these things will live and die well, and be as 
pure from sin as if he had just been born of his mother.” 

Other traditions relate how Mohammed ex¬ 
plained some of the pagan sacrifices, such as Al 
‘Aqiqa and the sacrifices at Mecca, as in a certain 
sense atoning for sin, so the doctrine of sub¬ 
stitution could not, in itself, have been repugnant 
to him (Mishkat 18: 3). 

Whatever the explanation may be, the fact re¬ 
mains that Islam from its origin until our own 
day has been an enemy of the Cross of Christ, and 
has ever made the crucifixion a cause of stum¬ 
bling. This position, once taken by orthodox 


88 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

Islam, has been held throughout the centuries. 
The historical fact of Christ’s crucifixion, with all 
it signifies to Christianity, has always been flatly 
contradicted. Only among the Shiah sect in Persia 
do we have a remarkable illustration of the doc¬ 
trine of the atonement and of substitution forcing 
a way for itself into Islam. The Aryan mind was 
never content with the barren monotheistic idea 
of the Semite Arabs. In Persia, the doctrine of 
an incarnation, of intercessors, and of salvation by 
atonement, found eager acceptance at an early 
date. Those who have witnessed the miracle play 
of Hassan and Hussein, commemorative of the 
events at Kerbela, will realize how large a place 
this death occupies in their life and thought as a 
propitiation for sin. At the close of the miracle 
play, the following words are put into the mouth 
of Mohammed: 

“The key of paradise is in Hussein’s hand. He is the 
mediator for all. Go thou and deliver from the flames 
everyone who has in his lifetime shed but a single tear 
for thee: everyone who has in any way helped thee; every¬ 
one who has performed a pilgrimage to thy shrine or 
mourned for thee. Bear each and all to paradise.”* 

In presenting this doctrine of the atonement, 
therefore, to Moslems of the Shiah sect, the story 
of Kerbela can be used to interpret that of Cal¬ 
vary, and finds a response. At the Cairo mission¬ 
ary conference the Rev. S. G. Wilson, of Tabriz, 
gave this testimony: “When we are setting forth 

* Sir Lewis Pelly, “The Miracle Play of Hassan and 
Husain,” Vol. II, pp. 343-348. 



STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 


89 


the story of the cross to Persians, they often re¬ 
ply, ‘In like manner the blood of Imam Hussein 
avails for us as an offering to God.' This condi¬ 
tion of belief prepares them to hear and under¬ 
stand the Christian doctrine of the atonement. 
It can be presented to them as to a Christian au¬ 
dience.” 

But how is it in regard to orthodox Islam? 
Should we emphasize this doctrine of the crucifix¬ 
ion where it is bitterly opposed and vigorously 
disputed? Would it not be the part of worldly 
wisdom and of missionary strategy to keep the 
Cross and the atonement (as well as the doctrine 
of the Trinity) well in the background, and pre¬ 
sent to Moslems the life of Christ rather than his 
death as the theme of our gospel? Shall we not 
follow the discretion (or was it the fear?) of the 
Sudan authorities in the matter of the postage 
stamps, and remove even the water-mark of the 
Cross from our preaching lest we offend our Mos¬ 
lem brethren? Let the Apostle Paul give us the 
answer, that apostle who taught “that no man 
should put a stumbling-block in his brother's way 
or an occasion of fallingand who made it a prin¬ 
ciple of his life that, “if meat causeth my brother 
to stumble, I will eat no flesh for evermore, that I 
cause not my brother to stumble.” His reply would 
be in the words he wrote to the disputers of this 
world: “Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stum¬ 
bling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” 

Paul knew that the Cross was a stumbling- 
block and the doctrine of the Cross foolishness to 


90 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

Jew and Gentile, and yet he deliberately, empha¬ 
tically, persistently, everywhere, made his mission 
and his message the Cross. As we think of the 
millions in Moslem lands to whom our hearts go 
out in sympathy—their ignorance, their sinful¬ 
ness, their utter need of the Saviour—those other 
words of the apostle find new meaning: “For 
many walk of whom I have told you often, and 
now tell you even weeping, that they are the ene¬ 
mies of the Cross of Christ.” Let us never on 
that account consider them our enemies, but prove 
to them that we are their friends by showing not 
by our creed only, but by our lives, the power of 
the Cross and its glory. We must meet this earli¬ 
est and latest challenge of our Moslem opponents 
not by compromises and concessions, nor by cow¬ 
ardice of silence, but by boldly proclaiming that 
the very heart of our religion, its center and its 
cynosure, its pivot and power, is the atonement 
wrought by Christ on the Cross. We must show 
them that the cross is the highest expression of 
the very Spirit of Christ; that, as Andrew Murray 
says, “the Cross is his chief characteristic; that 
which distinguishes Him from all in heaven and 
on earth; that which gives Him his glory as Me¬ 
diator on the throne through eternity.” If faith¬ 
fully, fearlessly, sympathetically, we preach 
Christ Crucified, He can make the stumbling- 
block of the Cross a stepping-stone for the Mos¬ 
lems into his kingdom. 

There is no other way into that Kingdom than 
the way of the Cross. Only by the preaching of 


STUMBLING-BLOCK OF THE CROSS 91 

the Cross can we expect among Moslems convic¬ 
tion of sin, true repentance, and faith in the 
merits of Another. The Cross, and the Cross 
alone, can break down their pride and self-right¬ 
eousness, and lay bare all hypocrisy and self- 
deception. More than this, the Cross will win their 
love if rightly preached. The Cross is the very 
antithesis of the spirit of Islam, because it is the 
spirit of Christianity. This issue must be made 
clear at the very outset, for it is wrapped up in 
every other truth of the Christian religion. Our 
conclusion, therefore, can find no better expres¬ 
sion than in the words of Denny: 

“We may begin as wisely as we please with 
those who have a prejudice against it, or whose 
conscience is asleep, or who have much to learn 
both about Christ and about themselves before 
they will consent to look at such a gospel, to say 
nothing of abandoning themselves to it; but if we 
do not begin with something which is essentially 
related to the atonement, presupposing it or pre¬ 
supposed by it or involved in it, something which 
leads inevitably, though it may be by an indirect 
and unsuspected route, to the Lamb of God that 
taketh away the sin of the world, we have not be¬ 
gun to preach the gospel at all 


* Denny, “The Death of Christ,” p. 302. 



VII 

“For it was by him that all things 
were created, both in heaven and on 
earth, both the seen and the unseen, in¬ 
cluding Thrones, angelic Lords, celestial 
Powers and Rulers; all things have been 
created by him and for him; he is prior 
to all, and all coheres in him. Also, he is 
the head of the Body, that is, of the 
Church, in virtue of his primacy as the 
first to be born from the dead—that 
gives him preeminence over all. For it 
was in him that the divine Fullness willed 
to settle without limit, and by him it 
willed to reconcile in his own person all 
on earth and in heaven alike, in a peace 
made by the blood of his cross.”—Col. 1: 
16-20 (Moffatt’s Translation). 






CHAPTER VII 


Christianity as Final Religion 


W HAT we know of Christ and Christianity 
is contained in the book called the New 
Testament. We must either accept it or 
reject it as the record of the historic 
Christ. Many passages might be quoted in which 
Jesus himself and his apostles claim that Chris¬ 
tianity is absolute and that He is the only Saviour. 
At two of the most solemn moments in the life of 
our Lord his self-assertion and the utter audacity 
of his claims would seem to prevent his classifica¬ 
tion with men. Either He was besides himself or 
He was in a unique sense the Son of God. What 
else can we infer from the record in Matt. 11: 25- 
28? Who but an absolute teacher with a final 
message would dare to say: “I thank Thee, 0 
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou 
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, 
and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, 
Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight. All 
things are delivered unto me of my Father; and 
no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither 
knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and 
he to whomsover the Son will reveal him.” Such 
words imply omnipotence, omnipresence, and om¬ 
niscience. In the Gospel according to John where 
Jesus tells Thomas (almost casually), T am the 
Way and the Truth and the Life; no man cometh 


96 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

unto the Father but by me,’ we cannot escape the 
same inference. Paul in the first chapter of Colos- 
sians uses language which, unless we do violence 
to every rule of syntax and interpretation, makes 
Jesus of Nazareth co-equal with Jehovah. “In 
Him were all things created. * * * In Him dwell- 
eth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. * * * 
In all things He must have the preeminence.” And 
in the final chapter of the New Testament Jesus 
is call the Alpha and Omega, the First and the 
Last, the Beginning and the End. Bengel points 
out that this is a manifest proof of the supreme 
glory and dignity of our Lord. “Before the first 
revelation of Him in the final consummation, there 
is no other God; all false gods have both been set 
up and removed in the meantime: and so before 
the coming of Christ in the flesh and after his 
coming to judgment there is no other Christ. All 
the Christs in between have been false Christs.” 

But the world demands others proofs than the 
statement of Revelation, however clear and con¬ 
clusive to the Christian. We gladly acknowledge 
that there is good and truth in the non-Christian 
religions. This has enabled them to survive and 
gives them their power. Yet there is no truth or 
beauty in them, which cannot be found, is not 
found, in a purer and more perfect form in Chris¬ 
tianity. Christ himself appeals to the results of 
his teaching as the proof of his mission. “By their 
fruits ye shall know them.” In at least ten par¬ 
ticulars Christ and Christianity stand supreme 
over against other leaders and their teachings. 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 


97 


1. Christ’s Bible, that is the Old Testament, 
and our Bible, which includes the New Testament, 
clearly teach the unity and solidarity of the hu¬ 
man race. Not only in the story of creation and 
in the prophecies and promises of the Old Testa¬ 
ment, but in the whole scheme of Revelation and 
the universality of its message, the Bible declares 
what Paul preached on Mars Hill: “That God made 
of one every nation of men for to dwell on all the 
face of the earth.” Contrast this teaching with 
that of caste in Hinduism, the Buddhist doctrine 
of incarnations, and the hopeless division of man¬ 
kind from all eternity into two classes, infidels and 
believers, taught by Islam. Even as there is no 
true conception of the Fatherhood of God outside 
of the Bible, so there is no true conception of the 
brotherhood of man. 

2. Christ came to destroy race-barriers and 
race-hatred. He gave womanhood its place, child¬ 
hood its rights, the slave his freedom, and the bar¬ 
barian welcome. In the fellowship of Jesus Christ, 
his love, his mercy, his Kingdom, there is neither 
Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free, 
Roman nor Barbarian. Wherever the followers of 
Jesus Christ have disobeyed this law of his King¬ 
dom through race-hatred and prejudice they have 
misrepresented that Kingdom which has no fron¬ 
tier, and in which the humble alone receive citi¬ 
zenship. 

The non-Christian religions without exception 
condemn women by the principles of their teach¬ 
ing to the place of chattel or slave. Buddhism 


98 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

proclaims that no woman as woman can be saved. 
What a contrast this is with the teaching of Jesus 
Christ to the outcast Samaritan at the well. Islam 
has degraded womanhood by the lives and the 
literature of its apostles, from the days of Mo¬ 
hammed and Ali until our own day. 

3. Christ, the founder of Christianity, is not the 
son of any nation or people, but the Son of Man, 
the Perfect Man. Mohammed was an Arab; that 
is his boast, and the result has been that as long 
as his religion abides, it is tied hand and foot to 
a civilization based upon the Arabian institutions 
of the seventh century. To be a true Moslem one 
must copy the pattern once for all laid down, and 
it is an arabesque—without life. 

“So while the world rolls on from age to age 
And realms of thought expand; 

The letter stands without expanse or range 
Stiff as a dead man’s hand.” 

Confucius was a Chinese scholar, Buddha an 
Indian ascetic, Socrates a Greek philosopher. The 
systems of thought and philosophy to which they 
gave birth are therefore indelibly national. But 
Jesus of Nazareth, although a Jew by lineage, was 
not a Jew in his limitations or ideals or teachings. 
He was neither an occidental nor an oriental in 
the popular meaning of these words. He combined 
in himself all the ideals of East and West, with¬ 
out any of their limitations. In Him we see the 
Alpha and Omega of ideal manhood. This thought 
is beautifully expressed by an Indian writer, M. C. 
Roy, who for more than twenty years has been a 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 


99 


headmaster of a mission school at Lucknow. The 
lines were written in reply to Kipling: 

' “Oh, East is East, and West is West, the twain 

" Shall never meet!—so sings the sage his song. 

One clear crescendo, as though nothing wrong. 

And naught but truth was uttered in that strain! 

' Now, ye who rush to swell the score of such 

* Half-truths and hybrid thoughts, come listen ye. 

To one that, all unlearning, learnt to be 
Responsive to the Spirit’s guiding touch: 

* Love that loves all, and dies to love again— 

* The love that spans all gulfs and scales all heights, 

That breaks all bars and holds in high disdain 

All that parts man from man, and disunites— 

* This God-Man’s Love that breathes sweet peace and rest, 

* Can blend, and blend in one, both East and West.” F_ 

4. Christ's purpose and command and promise 
in regard to his mission are world-wide. This is 
a unique characteristic even of Old Testament 
prophecy, that it sweeps the whole horizon and 
includes in its plan the final enlightenment, the 
salvation of all nations. The sixty-seventh Psalm, 
and the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah are examples. 
In no other book of all the sacred books of the 
East do we find such expressions regarding the 
universality of God's love, and his all-embracing 
purpose. The great commission in its four-fold 
form finds no parallel even in Islam or Buddhism, 
although both are missionary faiths. One ceases 
to be a Hindu by crossing the ocean. Islam has 
for the most part been self-limited on account of 
its prayer ritual to the heat-belt; but Christianity 
has gone to every nation and clime on its tri¬ 
umphal march. Of no other religious reader have 


100 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

men dared to write that “every knee shall bow 
and every tongue confess/' save as regards Jesus 
Christ. The watchword of the missionary enter¬ 
prise, the evangelization of the world in this gen¬ 
eration, is inconceivable when applied to any other 
religion; and it never has been conceived by any 
other enthusiast or disciple of other religions. 

5. The laws and ritual of the Christian religion 
are so simple and universal that they are possible 
everywhere and for everybody. The New Testa¬ 
ment knows of no sacred place or shrine, river or 
mountain. When the Samaritan woman referred 
to the sacred character of Mount Gerizim Jesus 
answered: “Neither in this mountain nor in Jeru¬ 
salem shall ye worship the Father. * * * God is 
a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship 
Him in spirit and truth." Whenever Christian 
tradition or practice has laid claim to special sanc¬ 
tity for any particular place, it was in direct con¬ 
flict with the teaching of Christ and the world- 
mission of his apostles. According to Islam, 
prayer is impossible at all times or in all places or 
by everybody. A prayer at Mecca has more value, 
arithmetical and spiritual, than at Medina; a 
prayer at Medina has more value than one at Je¬ 
rusalem. In Hinduism the three sacred rivers 
are the Indus, then the Sarasvati, and then the 
Ganges. There are hundreds of tirthas, sacred 
places for merit and pilgrimage. The whole prayer 
ritual in Buddhism and Islam is artificial and prac¬ 
tically impossible for women and children. In 
Mohammedan works of theology there are whole 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 101 

sections on the occasions, method, variety and ef¬ 
fect of ablution; on the different kinds of water 
allowed; on the times when prayer is not permit¬ 
ted and on the details of posture and genuflection, 
which would be puerile were they not pathetic. 
How simple are the teachings of Christ! How 
universal the injunctions of his apostles—‘Tray 
without ceasing”—“I will that men pray every¬ 
where.” Christianity enjoins no public or private 
duty which cannot be performed because of age, 
sex, clime or climate. In this respect its very sac¬ 
raments are simple and appropriate, and its form 
of worship can be observed in catacomb or ca¬ 
thedral, hut or palace, in prison or in the trenches, 
by land or by sea, at the poles and at the tropics. 
Jesus Christ is the only religious leader who ever 
identified his mission and his message with child¬ 
hood. We cannot conceive of Confucius or Bud¬ 
dha or Mohammed saying: “Suffer the little chil¬ 
dren to come unto me * * * of such is the king¬ 
dom of heaven.” 

6. The Gospel, that is the good news of the 
person and work and power of Jesus Christ, has 
been translated into all languages, and what is far 
more remarkable, is translatable into every hu¬ 
man speech. Most of the sacred books of the 
other religions are difficult to translate and in 
many cases impossible of translation because of 
their style and contents. The former is often ar¬ 
tificial and highly poetic, or in such literary form 
as to defy translation; but the Bible has proved as 
eloquent as it is comprehensible in all languages. 


102 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

Its style is human and its form universal. Many 
of the Hindu books, e.g., the Dharam Sindhu, 
which describes the holy festival and the “Tan- 
tras” that deal with Sakti worship are obscene 
and horrible beyond belief. Who would care to 
give a popular, literal translation of the thirty- 
third or sixty-sixth chapter of the Koran ? 

Although other sacred books have been trans¬ 
lated into languages not their own, they are the 
exception and not the rule. Most of these trans¬ 
lations were the result of Christian scholarship, 
and were not spontaneous. The Bible, however, 
has won its readers and proved its popularity from 
the earliest centuries. In days when each copy 
had to be made by hand the scribes multiplied 
only such books as were in demand; yet we are 
told that “the plays of Aeschylus survive in about 
fifty manuscripts, while of the New Testament we 
possess over 4,000 Greek manuscripts, more or 
less complete, besides 8,000 Latin manuscripts, of 
the Vulgate version.” The earliest book to be 
printed in Europe was the Latin Bible, and one 
hundred editions of it had appeared during the 
first half century of printing. The most popular 
modern English author is Charles Dickens, and 
it has been computed that since Pickwick ap¬ 
peared 25,000,000 copies of his books have gone 
out into the world. But during the last four years 
of war alone the Bible societies have circulated 
forty million portions of the Scriptures in 437 lan¬ 
guages. The Bible is the best-selling book in the 
world. 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 103 

7. Christ has begun to occupy the dominant 
place in the world of law and culture and morals. 
When Pilate wrote above the Cross “Jesus of Naz¬ 
areth King,” he unwittingly foretold that Christ 
should have dominion in the Latin world of law, 
civil and international, in the Greek world of lit¬ 
erature and culture, and in the Hebrew world of 
ethics and religion. The flags of at least two of 
the world’s greatest empires bear the sign of the 
Cross. The same symbol was fittingly chosen for 
the international and supernational ministry of 
aid and friendship to all who suffer the horrors of 
war—the Red Cross. The principles of interna¬ 
tional law are based on the teaching of the Sermon 
on the Mount. The violations of international law, 
the cruel wrongs of exploitations, or the malad¬ 
ministration of subject colonies are condemned by 
the conscience of humanity because that con¬ 
science has to some degree been Christianized. 
Christians have often failed, and Christian na¬ 
tions, but Christianity and Christ never. “The 
war,” said an Egyptian paper in 1915, “has proved 
not the failure of Christ or Christianity, but of 
Christians.” The old Greek civilization, its music, 
sculpture, painting, architecture and literature 
have been literally led captive in the train of Jesus 
Christ. All the fine arts have become finer be¬ 
cause of his coming into the world and his death 
on the Cross. All the world has gone after Him 
for new ideals. Whether this was done with rev¬ 
erence and awe or whether art stripped Jesus, as 
the soldiers did, of his raiment and, having re- 


104 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

jected Him, cast lots over his seamless robe, does 
not detract from our argument. The history of 
music, sculpture, painting and architecture, can¬ 
not leave out the story of the Gospel and must 
give some answer to explain the preeminence of 
Jesus. 

The ethics of the New Testament have become 
the international standard of right and wrong, the 
yard-stick by which men measure conduct. In no 
other way can we explain the fact that Hindus are 
today reading Christianity into Hinduism, and 
Moslems are rejoicing when they discover tradi¬ 
tions (however obscure) which point to the 
Christlike character of their prophet. Christian¬ 
ity has in recent years exercised an immense in¬ 
fluence upon Japanese life and thought, quite 
apart from its acknowledged doctrinal effect upon 
Buddhism and Shintoism in the past. The Babi- 
Behai faith, which claims to be the universal re¬ 
ligion, has borrowed not only its ethical standards 
and doctrinal terminology, but its very claim to 
be universal from Christianity. All of the Neo- 
Mahammedan sects which denounce polgamy, 
concubinage, divorce and slavery as contrary to 
Islam do violence to the facts of history in order 
to raise the Arabian to the level of the Nazarene. 

In the Koran and in orthodox Moslem tradi¬ 
tion, Christ is the only sinless prophet, untouched 
by Satan at birth, victorious over all temptation, 
and who returns at last from heaven to establish 
righteousness. 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 105 

8. Christ’s idea of God, nay, his revelation of 
God is the highest and most comprehensive con¬ 
ception of Deity that the human mind has ever 
expressed or imagined. A God who is at once 
transcendent in his unapproachable majesty, God 
the Father of all, above all, full of glory, whom no 
man can see; immanent in creation and through 
his Spirit in human hearts; incarnate in “the Son 
of his love in whom we have redemption through 
his blood.” “The God whom men know outside of 
Jesus Christ,” says Alexander Maclaren, “is a 
poor nebulous thing; an idea and not a reality.” 
No one would ever think of consulting Confucius, 
the sage of China, on the subject of God. On other 
matters his teaching is often very illuminating 
and helpful, but on this subject he practically 
taught nothing. “Where in all China,” writes 
Charles L. Ogilvie of Peking, “can one find any¬ 
thing that corresponds to what the ten-year-old 
Christian child knows about God, the Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ? Would anyone who knows 
this God be attracted by the hundred and one 
imaginary Buddhas, the innumerable Pu’sas, with 
the merciful Kwam Kin at the head, the Gemmy 
Emperor, who rules on Tai-shan; Kwan Ti, the 
god of war, or Allah, whose compassion is impri¬ 
soned by fate? He who was called the “bright¬ 
ness of the Father’s glory and the express-image 
of His person” has so flooded the world with light 
that no one who has seen the face of the heavenly 
Father is at all drawn to the gods of the nations.” 
Islam has risen higher than any of the other non- 


106 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

Christian faiths in its conception of God, and yet 
in four particulars has as conspicuously failed to 
reach the New Testament or even the Old Testa¬ 
ment idea, (a) There is no Fatherhood, (b) There 
is an absence of all emphasis on the supreme at¬ 
tribute of love with all its great implications, (c) 
Allah is not absolutely, unchangeably and eter¬ 
nally just. It is possible, as some allege, that the 
western church may have emphasized the forensic 
aspect of God’s holiness and righteousness unduly. 
But the Bible and the human conscience in all ages 
also emphasize this truth. It is found in Greek 
theism. The Judge of all the earth must do right. 
Allah, however, makes it easy for men; neither in 
his holiness nor in his mercy is his righteousness 
manifested, (d) Add to this that there is, as Ray¬ 
mond Lull pointed out, a lack of harmony in 
Allah’s attributes. Without an atonement, how 
could there be real harmony? 

Christ is the final revelation of God as regards 
his being and his attributes. “He that hath seen 
me,” He said, “hath seen the Father.” “No man 
hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son 
hath declared Him.” 

9. Christ combines in Himself the highest 
ideal of character and of redemption. All religions 
have ideals of character and ways of salvation. 
They all start from the same point in response to 
the hunger of the human heart for rest and for¬ 
giveness, and in search for higher life. But they 
all fail to reach the goal. 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 107 


“Not all the blood of beasts on [their] altars 
slain can give the guilty conscience peace or wash 
away the stain.” Aside from every theory of the 
atonement the fact remains that Christ satisfies 
the human heart as a sufficient Saviour. Tens of 
thousands of every nation and tribe and kindred 
testify. 


“Thou, O Christ, art all I want, 

More than all in Thee I find.” 

Only of this Man was it said, “Behold the Lamb 
of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” 

The character of Jesus is incomparable. He is 
the holiest among the mighty and the mightiest 
among the holy. “By the confession of friend and 
foe alike,” says Bosworth Smith, the apologist for 
Mohammed, “the character of Jesus of Nazareth 
stands alone in its spotless purity and its unap¬ 
proachable majesty.” The non-Christian reli¬ 
gions one and all present no perfect moral ideal. 
Not one of the founders of ethnic religions ever 
used words like Christ did: “Which of you con- 
vinceth me of sin?” None of them claimed to be 
morally the ideal and goal of humanity. Jesus 
said He was ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life,’ 
and proved it. 

10. He proves it today. He offers the strong¬ 
est possible evidence for the truth of his teaching, 
namely, experience. Christianity is not primarily 
a religion based on human or divine authority, al¬ 
though it has the authority of Divine revelation 
through human channels and of Him who claimed 


108 CHRISTIANITY THE FINAL RELIGION 

to be the Son of God. Nor does Christianity base 
its claims on tradition—though unbroken tradition 
—as does Islam or later Judaism. Nor does Christ, 
although He worked miracles, appeal to might as 
an argument for the truth of his teaching. Chris¬ 
tianity was not propagated by force or by the 
sword. Those that seized it were ignorant of or 
blind to the spirit of their Master. Nor did 
Christ depend on the logic of argument to con¬ 
vince men, although He spoke as never man spake. 
He appealed to the freedom of the human will by 
inviting men to try the experiment of his friend¬ 
ship and fellowship: “Follow me,” “Come unto 
me,” “Ask and ye shall receive,” “If any man will 
do His will he shall know,” “Ye will not come unto 
me,” “Will ye also go away,” and “Him that 
cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” The 
experiment to which Christ here challenges the 
human heart has been tried for twenty centuries 
by hundreds of millions and never yet failed. 
Those who draw near to Christ, enter his friend¬ 
ship, look up into his face and clasp his pierced 
hand, always experience two things. First, a sense 
of spiritual and moral bankruptcy, and then a sense 
of spiritual and moral asset and affluence. The 
character and the demands of Jesus produce the 
first; His Cross and Resurrection the second. Paul 
the self-righteous becomes the “chief of sinners”; 
Paul the dauntless can do all things through 
Christ, possesses all things in Christ and inherits 
all because of Christ. And Paul’s experience was 
not unique. It has been repeated in the labora- 


CHRISTIANITY AS FINAL RELIGION 109 

tory of the hearts of all “twice-born men” down 
the ages. Those who have had this experience 
have no further doubt that Christ is the only 
Saviour, and Christianity the final religion. For 
them the two eternities, past and future, and the 
whole period lying in between are united and 
controlled by one purpose, redemption through 
Christ. He is the Alpha and the Omega. In all 
things He has the preeminence. He will yet rec¬ 
oncile all things unto himself, whether things 
upon the earth or things in the heavens. He will 
restore the lost harmony of the universe, because 
to Him every knee shall bow and every tongue 
confess. As Pascal declares in his Thoughts on 
Religion, “Jesus Christ is the center of every¬ 
thing and the object of everything, and he who 
does not know Him knows nothing of the order of 
the world and nothing of himself. In Him is all 
our felicity and virtue, our life, our light, our 
hope; apart from Him there is nothing but vice, 
misery, darkness, despair, and we see only obscur¬ 
ity and confusion in the nature of God and in our 
own.” 




©tber ^ooks bg tbc Same author 

RAYMUND LULL: FIRST MISSIONARY 
TO MOSLEMS 

ISLAM A CHALLENGE TO FAITH 

THE MOSLEM DOCTRINE OF GOD 

THE MOSLEM CHRIST 

UNOCCUPIED MISSION FIELDS OF 
AFRICA AND ASIA 

CHILDHOOD IN MOSLEM LANDS 

THE DISINTEGRATION OF ISLAM 

THE INFLUENCE OF ANIMISM ON 
ISLAM 

A MOSLEM SEEKER AFTER GOD 

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